George Frederic Watts, between Sculpture and Painting: towards a “Sculpturality of Colour”

This article focuses on Victorian artist George Frederic Watts through a material and cross-media approach, which focuses on colour. Starting with a multimedia case study, I first examine how G.F. Watts considered painting and sculpture as “sister arts,” in the words used by English poet Algernon Swinburne, and how he built and diffused his artistic identity as both that of a painter and that of a sculptor. Next, this paper analyzes the similarities between his painting and sculpting techniques to underline his highly idiosyncratic artistic practice. In this regard, it sheds light on a new aspect of the revival of the issue of paragone during the nineteenth century, from a material perspective. My analysis is largely grounded in George Frederic Watts’s biographies, written by his contemporaries and especially by his wife Mary Setton Watts, as well as in the hitherto unpublished correspondence between G.F. Watts and his supplier Winsor and Newton (later known as the North London Colour Work). This paper also highlights the impact of the rediscovery of ancient polychromy on Victorian artists and reveals how the Elgin marbles constituted for Watts and his fellow artists a real pictorial paradigm, leading them to consider and re-consider the texture and surface of their paintings, as well as the materiality of their works. Finally, I examine how G.F. Watts thought of the materiality of the colours he used as a way to transcend the material world in order to reach the immaterial.