res).
1882. D.C.L., Oxford; LL.D., Cambridge.
1886. November; marries Miss Fraser Tytler. Winter in Egypt.
1890. New home at Limnerslease, Compton.
1895. National Portrait Gallery opened.
1896. New Gallery exhibition (155 pictures).
1897. Gift of pictures to new Tate Gallery.
1902. Order of Merit.
1904. Death at Compton, July 1.

GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS

ARTIST

The great age of British art was past before Queen Victoria began her
long and memorable reign. Reynolds and Gainsborough had died in the
last years of the eighteenth century, Romney and Hoppner in the first
decade of the nineteenth; Lawrence, the last of the Georgian
portrait-painters, did not live beyond 1830. Of the landscapists Crome
died in 1821 and Constable in 1837. Turner, the one survivor of the
Giants, had done three-quarters of his work before 1837 and can hardly
be reckoned as a Victorian worthy.

[Illustration: GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS

From a painting by himself in the National Portrait Gallery]

In the reign of Queen Victoria many thousands of trivial anecdotic
pictures were bought and sold, were reproduced in Art Annuals and
Christmas Numbers and won the favour of rich amateurs and provincial
aldermen--so much so that Victorian art has been a favourite target for
the shafts of critics formed in the school of Whistler and the later
Impressionists. But however just some of their strictures may be, it is
foolish to condemn an age wholesale or to shut our eyes to the great
achievements of those artists who, rising above the general level,
dignified the calling of the painter just when the painters were most
rare. These men formed no single movement progressing in a uniform
direction. The study of pure landscape is best seen in the water-colour
draughtsmen, Cotman, Cox, and de Wint; of landscape as a setting for the
life of the people, in Fred Walker and George Mason. Among
figure-painters the 'Pre-Raphaelites', Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and
Millais, with their forerunner Madox Brown, are the first to win
attention by their earnestness, their romantic imagination, and their
intense feeling for beauty: in these qualities Burne-Jones carried on
their work and retained the allegiance of a cultured few to the very end
of the century. Two solitary figures are more difficult to class, Alfred
Stevens and Watts. Each learnt fruitful lessons from prolonged study of
the great art of the past; yet each preserves a marked originality in
his work. More than