the "Psyche," and the "Three Goddesses," or, as the artist prefers to call it, "Olympus on Ida." Perhaps the latter more properly belongs to the class in which the artist has given himself up more completely to the overpowering charm of the dreams of classical poetry-dreams of Arcadia and Olympus. Under this head may be mentioned the lovely "Bacchanal" and the "Ganymede." More hard to class are the "Genius of Greek Poetry," that fine design which reminds one equally of Phidias and Michael Angelo, and the playful pictures of Cupids in various delightful occupations, like “Good Luck to your Fishing," works of his old age but full of the very sportfulness of youth. Fourthly, come a few biblical subjects, which, like the classical ones, are not "illustrations" so much as embodiments of ideas suggested by the Bible. Such are "Cain," the typical presentment of the wrath of Heaven against murder, and the Rider on the White Horse," the majestic image of the power that conquers. If we add the series of evil forces of human life in the hideous forms of "Minotaur," "Mammon," etc.; a few pictures of the misery of London like "Drowned," and a few more trivial subjects like "A Rainy Day," we shall have pretty well indicated the range which Mr. Watts has allowed to his imagination-and a wide range it is, as wide almost as life itself.

The forms in which Mr. Watts has clothed his abstract ideas are of great force and dignity, and many of his conceptions are often striking in their originality, clinging in no way to old traditions except when those are in accordance with his own sense of essential truth. Time the destroyer, imaged from time immemorial as an old man, appears to him to be ever young and strong, marching through all the ages with unfaltering step, a destroyer maybe, but also the leader of life. So he has drawn him in his impressive design of "Time, Death, and Judgment." th appears to him no more as the ning skeleton of the Danse Macabre, either a sad irresistible force, ger even than love (human love), perhaps the grandest of all his

pictures, the "Love and Death,"* or as the endlessly pitying angel who consoles all mortals for their troubles, as in the "Angel of Death," and the "Throne of Death," that monumental picture which still unfinished hangs in his studio at "Limners Lease," his country house near Guildford. Love, sometimes as the ideal of human beauty, as in the "Wife of Pygmalion," or of celestial beauty, as in the Venus in the "Three Goddesses;" sometimes as a beautiful winged figure, as in "Love and Death," again as the guide of Life helping her feeble footsteps to reach the rocky summit of earthly pilgrimage, as in "Love and Life." All these loves are beneficent, but the influence of maleficent passion he has made the subject of two or three pictures on which he has lavished a more than usual wealth of invention and an unwonted luxury of color. These are his two visions of the "Fata Morgana" from Boiardo's poem, and "Mischief," in which a figure representing Physical Manhood is snared in the briers by Passion in the form of Love. In such subjects, and those based upon classical legend, the ideas are naturally conveyed in forms which suggest perfect physical beauty; but Watts paints what is called "the nude" with a grandeur of style and a reserve in imitation which so purifies them that they never appeal directly to the senses. We see all his figures as in a mirror, surrounded and softened, but not blurred, by a charmed atmosphere. Some of these pictures are of his finest, nor do I know any artist who has rendered so powerfully the awful moment when Eurydice falls back, dead, slain again by the look of her lover. The "Daphne" is certainly one of the most beautiful single figures in all art, and despite its fully developed contours one of the purest, the ideal of virgin beauty shrinking before the advent of the Sun - God. A worthy companion is the girlish figure of Psyche, conscious of the ruin of her happiness by the indulgence of her curiosity. Both of these figures, like so much of Watts's work, show how strongly he combines the temperament

Presented by the artist to the Whitworth Institute at Manchester.

of the painter and the sculptor. It was the remark of one of the most celebrated sculptors of the present day, on looking round the Gallery at Little Holland House,* that he had left little for sculptors to do. He referred not to Watts's sculpture, but his paintings, in which he has expressed the most fundamental ideas of philosophy and religion, the most abstract types of human passion, in the language of form and gesture. It is still one of the doubts in Mr. Watts's own mind whether his natural talent was not stronger in the direction of sculpture than painting. Yet he has never for a moment forgotten the limits which technically divide the domain of the one art from the other. If the ideas are those which might have been well expressed in sculpture, he has always seen them, felt them, and expressed them as an artist whose medium is paint and not marble, as one who had to produce on a flat surface the illusion of relief, and as one to whom color should always form an essential constituent of conception. His pictures can never be open to the charge against David and his school, of being bas-reliefs painted. They are thought as well as wrought in paint, and paint only.

No illustration of this can be much better than his beautiful picture of the "Judgment of Paris," or the "Three Goddesses," a subject which demands ideal treatment whether at the hand of a sculptor or a painter. It may be compared with the Three Graces in that fine antique group now preserved in the library of Siena Cathedral, with the picture made from it by Raphael (once in the Dudley Gallery and now in the collection of the Duc d'Aumale), and again with the Three Goddesses in Reubn's picture in the National Gallery. In the first work we have sculpture pure, in the second sculpture painted, while in the third we have pure painting in which the ideal is missed. Rubens's Three Goddesses may represent his so-called "ideal" of female beauty, but they are only Flemish women of fine physique painted as nearly like nature as possible. Watts's

*Full of his life-work, and opened free to the public

on Saturdays and Sundays.

Three Goddesses are distinctly ideal dreams of abstract beauty, but they are not sculpture, they are not even translations of sculpture into painting; they are conceived with a painter's sense and executed with a painter's hand.

But Watts is a sculptor also. His exquisite bust of " Clytie" is so large in style and noble in movement, that it lives in the memory with the antique. Mr. Gosse in a recent paper has claimed for it a notable place in the history of modern sculpture, as marking that new departure from the old conventions which has revivified the art in the present generation. Richly picturesque in its design and full of vigorous life is the colossal equestrian statue of Hugh Lupus, the huntsman, the Grosveneur, which adorns the grounds of Eaton Hall, the seat in Cheshire of the Duke of Westminster, the head of the house of Grosvenor. Finely realized is the action of Lupus as he reins in his steed to watch under his uplifted hand the flight of his hawk. Of nobler suggestion, and of equal grandeur, is another equestrian statue, in which the rider is no mediæval sportsman but the spirit of Physical Energy itself. This still awaits completion. Nor, in the record of his plastic work, must I omit to mention the fine recumbent figure of Bishop Lonsdale in Lichfield Cathedral.

The landscapes of Mr. Watts have been few and far between, but they are as characteristic as any of his work, and perhaps more unique. His "Return of the Dove to the Ark," with its wild waste of waters and relentless sky, struck, as he has so often done, a new note of elemental poetry, and his more realistic but still (in the intellectual sense) "impressionist" records of Naples and its vicinity, one of which, "Vesuvius," has recently been admirably engraved by Mr. Frank Short, are nearer perhaps to Turner in feeling than any of the works of that artist's imitators. The same may be said of two small views of misty sea, gray but palpitating with iridescent color, which formed a striking feature of the Exhibition at the New Gallery a year or two ago.

with its sun rising in a huge envelope In his "Morning after the Deluge,"

of orange mist, he tends to the transcendental, as indeed he does in his strange vision of the Conscience the "Dweller in the Innermost "as he calls it-a description of which is impossible. As I look through what I have written I am sadly struck with the numbers of things which I have wished to say and have left unsaid.* His portraits of women, many of which are of great beauty, and some of his finest pictures, like "Endymion" and "Paolo and Francesca," have been left almost unnoticed. The latter is unique among Watts's work, for it is the only picture in which he has set himself to express the ideas of another's mind. It is also one of his most successful pictures, and by far the finest rendering of Dante's immortal episode that has been made by any artist.

I have said nothing either of his trilogy of the history of "Eve," which will hereafter count among the noblest of his works. That I have said little about the artist and his life I care little, for such reticence would be in accordance with his wishes. He lives, as he has always lived, a life quiet and retired, but not without the society of a large and choice circle of friends, surrounded, whether in town at Little Holland House (the second), or in the country at Limners Lease, by his works in various states of completion, touching now one and now another, as his impulse comes. He has sold comparatively few of his pictures, not from want of buyers, but from choice, in order to keep them by him to perfect, and with the view of devoting his life's work, as far as possible, to the nation. So he has kept himself comparatively, but only comparatively, poor, with enough to enable him to work in peace, without display. He has twice refused the honor of a baronetcy, as, among other reasons, unsuited to his quiet tastes and moderate means. Not late in his career and with steps of unusual rapidity he attained the highest honors of his profession, and since then his position has remained unas

On his technique and other matters I have already written, in the article before referred to, in the Magazine of Art (1882).

sailed.* Never robust in health, he has lived to a good old age. With eyesight almost unimpaired, and hand almost as sure as ever, he still works on, not only perfecting his earlier work, but actually developing new interests and power. He is one of those men who, like his forerunners, Bellini and Titian, never seem to grow old in spirit, remaining keenly alive to all the movements of the day in his art and out of it. One of the most striking signs of the vitality of his mind is the new departure in color, of which many of his later works are the witness. He has never looked upon color, as most painters do, as an aim in itself apart from his subject. Color, form, and subject have to him been always inseparable parts of his conception, and this is the reason why his color is somewhat unequal as a pleasure-giving quality, and why some fail to understand how a man who has shown such a sense of rich color in such pictures as "Mischief" or "The Birth of Eve," should forego its attrac tions when treating subjects to which it is less appropriate. But of late years, perhaps the "Uldra" (water-nymph) of 1882 was the first sign of it, he has shown new interest in the vibration of light and color, and many of his later pictures, like "Hope" and "Love" and

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Death," shimmer with a tender iridescence. This lovely effect is perhaps most palpable in his very last imaginative work, a vision of "Iris," with her drapery fluttering behind a rainbow, one of the most beautiful of all his creations.

On the gentle influence which has blessed his later years I scarcely dare to touch; but it will be good for all lovers of art and all admirers of his noble life to know that, with Mrs. Watts by his side, the peaceful progress of the one and the happy prolongation of the other are as well assured as anything can be in a changing world.

*Of the many evidences of appreciation, not only in

his own country, one of the most notable was the request to add his portrait to the great portrait gallery of artists in the Uffizzi at Florence, where it now hangs side by side with those of the "old masters."

† It is generally when the artist's imagination has not been strongly engaged that his color is unsatisfactory; as a rule, the nobler the subject the finer the color.