G.F. Watts: Seeing the Good

"Self-Portrait Aged Seventeen," 1834
by G.F. Watts

"It was at Freshwater that G.F. Watts gave me my first lesson. I was painting a pretty thatched cottage in one of the lanes when he opened his little garden gate and stood over my easel. I remember his saying I had painted the old chimney of the cottage as the Venetians would have painted it - cleanly and frankly with no smudge edges. Besides desiring always to see the best in everything, Watts had a natural gift for doing so. This gave a very flattering tone to his criticisms, and these have at times unfortunately raised hopes never to be realized. It was not insincerity which made him say nice things. It was a genuine wish to discover anything that might be good in it, combined with an absence of the critical faculty. 

The mistake he made was, I think, that, having a habit of mind which depreciated his own work, he did not realize the weight which every word he spoke had in the minds of students, who not unnaturally exaggerated the value of the performances he had praised. I do not remember being over-elated by Watts' kindness, for I had just got far enough to know that I could paint nothing as I wanted to paint it, and being critical by nature, I had within myself my harshest fault-finder. But his sympathy with me in my small efforts certainly tended to make us friends. 

When we were leaving Freshwater, he asked us not to forget to come to see him in his studio in the new Little Holland House which he had built in Melbury Road. So I took him the work I was doing, and we had long talks together, in which he explained to me very exhaustively his views about his own art."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "G.F. Watts: Reminiscences," 1906, by Mrs. Russell Barrington.)