George Frederic Watts, OM, RA (British, 1817-1904) The creation of Eve

George Frederic Watts, OM, RA (British, 1817-1904) The creation of Eve oil on canvas 86.5 x 35.5cm (34 1/16 x 14in). Footnotes: Provenance Anon. sale, Sotheby's, Belgravia, 24 October 1978, lot 17. Literature Mary Seton Watts, Manuscript Catalogue of Watts's Paintings, Subjects, pp. 45-46. Mary Seton Watts, G. F. Watts: The Annals of an Artist's Life, Macmillan and Co., 1912, vol I, pp. 68, 261-62, vol II, p. 45. The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones & Watts: Symbolism in Britain, Tate Gallery Publishing, London, 1997, pp. 265-26, cat. no. 124. Julia Cartwright, 'The Life and Work of George Frederic Watts, RA', The Art Journal, Easter, 1896. Athenaeum, 30 March 1867, p. 426. Veronica Franklin Gould, G.F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian, Yale University Press, 2004 pp. 21, 86-87, 163. This is an early study for the first subject in Watts's Great Trilogy of Eve (Cartwright, 1896, 13, ill. 11). The prime versions, ultimately named She Shall Be Called Woman, Eve Tempted and Eve Repentant (c1865-97) were presented to the nation by the artist, for the opening of the National Gallery of British Art (Tate Britain) in 1897. He painted the newly created Eve shortly after separating from his teenage bride, the actress Ellen Terry whose head inspired Eve in the trilogy. Watts conceived his ideas for a Michelangelesque hall of frescoes in the late 1840s. At the age of 26, he won a top prize in Prince Albert's competition to decorate the walls of the Palace of Westminster in 1843 and used the award money to travel to Italy to study frescoes in the Grand Manner of the Renaissance. He returned to England 1847 to a further Westminster prize and began to make sketches for a cosmic epic, a scheme to embody the progress of the cosmos and civilization, cultural history and spiritual thought. Intended to uplift the nation and decades ahead of the Symbolist movement, more suited to the Continent than to British taste and climate, Watts's visionary ambition was thwarted. He resolved instead to paint subjects for the scheme on canvas, each in itself of universal interest. The Eve series was designed as part a group within the scheme. Watts would develop many versions of each subject, large and small, often concurrent, under various titles. In 1873, the artist explained to a patron: 'These designs – Eve in the glory of her innocence, Eve yielding to temptation, and Eve restored to beauty and nobility by remorse – form part of one design and can hardly be separated, any more than one would think of separating the parts of an epic poem. My intention was to make them part of an epic and they belong to a series of six pictures illustrating the story in Genesis, viz, the three Eves – The Creation of Eve, After the Transgression and Cain – three single figures and three full compositions. These I always destined to be public property.' (Watts, 1912, I, p.262) A full composition, for example, the multi-figure The Creation of Eve (Harvard Art Museums, Fogg Museum) shows Eve emerging from Adam's rib (Genesis 2, xxiii). This monochrome single-figure painting of The Creation of Eve – the newly created Eve in the glory of her innocence – has never been exhibited. Watts's naked Eves were painted with reference to monumental drawings he had made from Mary Bartley, the statuesque housemaid at Little Holland House, where the artist lodged with magnificent studios at the home of Thoby and Sara Prinsep. His 'Long Mary' studies of body and limb served as models for Watts's imaginative representations of universal, rather than recognisable figures. While he himself considered these 'perfectly naked figures' a genre more suited to public galleries rather than private homes, Watts's standing nudes of the period were prized by private collectors. The first standing Eve he exhibited – larger and not quite the same pose - was a development of the present study, shown at the French Exhibition in Pall Mall, London, on Saturday 30 March 1867: 'the mother of mankind1 standing as if just after the moment of creation, lost in wonder at existence, and, it may be, in an ecstasy of thankfulness. One of her hands is slightly raised, her face upturned, one foot advanced a little before the other. Her limbs look large in their dark ardent, but not glowing, hues and almost marble-like firmness of contour. Behind is rich vegetation.' (Athenaeum, 30 March 1867, 426.) Eve's hands are lowered in the present study, her palms facing down to link Heaven and Earth, as in the similar-sized version of She Shall be Called Woman at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool, where clouds begin to whirl about her body. According to Mary Watts, her husband intended his columnar newly created Eve to represent the central figure of the universe, 'the Greek vision of 'A line of light, straight as a column extending though the whole heaven and through the earth''. Rather than standing in light, Eve is herself emitting light, as can be seen in the present study emanating from her head. (George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist's Life) An even earlier version had shown Eve's face still in full light. But here, as the artist intended, 'The upturned face is dark in the midst of light, for the human intuitions may take the human mind into a region where reason stops, [quoting Milton's Paradise Lost I, iii, 380] 'dark with excessive light.''2 His idea was to depict not the apotheosis of womanhood, but qualities of femininity. In the prime large version of the powerfully retitled She Shall Be Called Woman, Eve appears to emerge from nature, encircled in flowers, birds and clouds, a butterfly, symbol of the soul flutters above her and light is concentrated over the heart and breast, the seat of tenderness, goodness and love. Unique in the present picture is a lion, symbol of bravery, nobility and strength. 1Genesis 4, xx: 'the mother of all living'. 2Milton, Paradise Lost III, xxxlvi. We are grateful to Veronica Franklin Gould for her assistance in cataloguing this lot. 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