George Frederick Watts O.M., R.A. 1817-1904

George McCulloch (from 1895);
Christie’s McCulloch Sale, 23,29 & 30 May 1913, lot 195 (sold for 1,700 guineas);
Sotheby’s 11 July, 1934, lot 128 (sold for £240);
C.H. Milkinson, MC, Dean of Worcester College, Oxford (1944);
Fine Art Society, London;
M. Newman Ltd, London (1960, and by whom offered for sale to the Watts Gallery, Compton, for £800, but not purchased);
Private Collection

London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1870, no. 193;
London, Grosvenor Gallery, 1881-2;
New York, 1884-5;
Birmingham, 1885-6;
Nottingham, 1886-7;
London, Guildhall, 1890;
Munich, Society of Artists, 1893;
London, New Gallery, 1896-7;
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Winter Exhibition, 1905;
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Winter Exhibition, 1909;
Dublin, Arts and Industry Exhibition, 1872

Art Journal, 1870, pg. 164;
Richard Herne Shepherd, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1870, pg. 29;
Julia Cartwright, ‘The Life & Work of George Frederic Watts’, Art Journal Easter Annual, 1896;
J.E. Phythian, George Frederick Watts, London, 1906, pp. 89,134;
Hugh Macmillan, The Life-Work of George Frederick Watts, London, 1906, pp.171-2;
Ronald Chapman, The Laurel and the Thorn, London, 1945, pp. 83, 100, 147;
George Frederic Watts, exhibition catalogue, Arts Council, 1954-5;
Connoisseur, March 1960, reproduced on the cover;
Wilfrid Blunt, ‘England’s Michelangelo’, London 1975, pg. 235, n 1;
Newnes’ Art Library, G.F. Watts, n.d., pg.xxv, pl. 19;
Mary Watts, ‘Catalogue of the Works of the late G. F. Watts’, n.d., vol.1, pg.54

The subject of Watt’s painting Fata Morgana comes from Matteomaria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, an incomplete cycle of poems published in Italian in 1487. Boiardo drew on and combined various legends of the old chivalry, notably including those of Charlemagne and King Arthur. Fata Morgana (or, in English, Morgan le Fay) was the queen of Avalon and half-sister to Arthur. A witch or malevolent fairy (‘fata’ is the Italian work for fairy), she symbolises Fortune or Opportunity, and in Book II, Cantos viii-ix of Orlands Innamorato holds Rinaldo and other paladins of Charlemagne captive by the power of her magic. Orlando come across her as she sleeps beside a fountain in a meadow. She awakes, and dances before him singing a song of beguilement. Watts may have been familiar with the translation of these lines into English by William Rose, of 1823:

Who in this world would wealth and treasure share,
Honour, delight, and state, and what is best,
Quick let him catch me by the lock of hair
Which flutters from my forehead, and be blest;
But let him not the proffered good forbear,
Nor, till he seize the fleeting blessing, rest.
For present loss is sought in vain tomorrow,
And the deluded wretch is left in sorrow.

From 1895 the present version of Fata Morgana belonged to George McCulloch, the Scottish emigrant whose vast fortune was made from Australian gold and silver mining. McCulloch had returned to Britain to live in London in 1893, and immediately commenced the formation of a collection of contemporary British and French paintings, with a particular taste for classical subjects and nude imagery- often on a large scale.