orrow.

Watts was most reluctant to enter into controversy and had no ambition
to found a school; in fact so far was he from imposing his views on
others, that he scarcely ever took pupils, and was content to urge young
artists to follow their own line and to be sincere. But he could at
times be drawn into putting some of his views on paper, and in 1893 he
wrote down a statement of the relative importance which he attached to
the qualities which make a painter. Among these Imagination stands
first, Intellectual idea next to it. After this follow Dignity of form,
Harmony of lines, and Colour. Finally, in the sixth place comes Realism,
the idol of so many of the end of the century, both in literature and
art.

Some years earlier, in meeting criticism, Watts had said, 'I admit my
want of dexterity with the brush, in some cases a very serious defect,'
but at the same time he refused to accept the authority of those 'who
deny that art should have any intellectual intention'. In general, he
pleaded that art has a very wide range over subject and treatment; but
he did not set himself up as a reformer in art, nor inflict dogmas on
the public gratuitously. He found that some of his more abstract themes
needed handling in shadowy and suggestive fashion: if this gave the
impression of fumbling, or displayed some weakness in technique, even so
perhaps the conception reaches us in a way that could not be attained by
dexterity of brushwork. As he himself said, 'there were things that
could only be done in art at the sacrifice of some other things'; but
the points which Watts was ready to sacrifice are what the realists
conceive to be indispensable, and his aims were not as theirs. But his
life was very little troubled by controversy; and he would not have
wished his own work to be a subject for it.

External circumstances also had little power to alter the even tenor of
his way. Late in life, at the age of 69, he married Miss Fraser Tytler,
a friend of some fifteen years' standing, who was herself an artist, and
who shared all his tastes. After the marriage he and his wife spent a
long winter in the East, sailing up the Nile in leisurely fashion,
enjoying the monuments of ancient Egypt and the colours of the desert.
It was a time of great happiness, and was followed by seventeen years
of a serene old age, divided between his London house in Melbury Road
and his new home in Surrey. Staying with friends in Surrey, Watts had
made acq