George Frederick Watts

Private Collection (and sold, Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York, October 28, 1982, lot 88)
Private Collection (and sold, Sotheby's, New York, May 23, 1997, lot 152, illustrated)
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

M. S. Watts, George Frederick Watts, The Annals of an Artist's Life, London, 1912, vol. 1, pp. 283-4, 314, 32; vol. II, pp. 49, 86-7, 105-9 (for discussion and illustration of related versions)
Victorian High Renaissance, exh. cat., Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1978, no. 20 (for discussion and illustration of the Bristol Art Gallery version)
Mark Bills and Barbara Bryant, G.F. Watts, Victorian Visionary, London, 2008, pp. 208-211 (for discussion and illustration of related studies)

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This large and impressive picture seems to have received little or no attention at all from a restorer since it was painted. It is painted very broadly on a heavy piece of canvas that may even be burlap. The paint layer is in extremely good condition. It is unvarnished and appears to be un-cleaned. There is no visible damage. There are cracks in the upper right in the background; these are noticeable but do not seem to indicate any instability. Some slight correction to these cracks could be applied, and the work could easily be cleaned and lightly vanished to great effect. Lining is certainly not recommended, as the painting is in beautiful condition.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Love and Death is arguably one of Watts' most memorable and influential pictures and among the best-known masterpieces of the wider European Symbolist Movement. Extant in several versions (in the public galleries at Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Adelaide, Melbourne, in the Tate collection and in various private collections), the present lot is most closely related in its treatment to the figures and draperies to the large prime version that was completed in 1877 (fig. 1, Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester) and exhibited at the pioneering inaugural show at the Grosvenor Gallery of that year and shown virtually continuously for a decade and at every subsequent opportunity possible for the artist. Watts described it as "one of the most important things I can do and shall ever do."

Probably painted in the late 1870s, the present work is one of three full-scale versions of a subject that Watts worked on intermittently from the late 1860s until the time of his death. The composition is said to have been inspired by his witnessing the illness and eventual death of the eighth Marquess of Lothian.

The painting's symbolism is intended to be understood in abstract and universal terms, and the subject has remained one of the most famous and most frequently commented upon of all of Watt's works. Here, rather than depict death as a ghastly skeleton, or as a cloaked figure holding a scythe as his initial sketches imply, Watts depicts it as a cloaked female figure. Henry James described the scene as a "figure, with its back to the spectator, and with a sinister sweep of a garment and gesture, prepares to pass across a threshold where, beside a rosebush that has shed its flowers, a boy figure of love staggers forth and, with head and body reverts in entreaty, tries in vain to bar its entrance" (as quoted in J. L. Sweeney, ed., Henry James, The Painter's Eye, London, 1956, p. 142).

The title Love and Death is taken from a poem by Tennyson which had appeared in Poems Chiefly Lyrical of 1830:

'"What time the mighty moon was gathered light
Love paced the thymy plots of Paradise,
And all about him roll'd his lustrous eyes;
When, turning round a cassia, full in view,
Death walking alone beneath a yew,
And talking to himself, first met his sight:
"You must begone" said Death, "these walks are mine."
Love wept and spread his sheeny vans for flight;
Yet ere he parted said, "This hour is thine:
Thou are the shadow of life, and as the tree
Stands in the sun and shadows all beneath,
So in the light of great eternity
Life eminent creates the shade of death;
The shadow passeth when the tree shall fall,
But I shall reign for ever over all."

(Tennyson, "Love and Death," 1830)