Europa also known as Europa and the Bull;

Painting height: 53.3 cm
Painting width: 66 cm

Watts probably started this painting in the late 1860s, when he drew a sketch of a nude woman on the back of a bull on an invitation to meet with the president of the Royal Academy. Mary Watts noted that much of the surface as it appears today was finished in the late 1890s. Watts may have been inspired by the Renaissance artist Titian’s painting of the same subject. Copies of this were displayed in London, and the original was sold to the American collector Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1896. Europa was an ancient princess who caught the eye of Zeus. He disguised himself as a handsome white bull and hid in her father’s flocks of cattle. When Europa climbed on his back, he ran into the sea and swam away to Crete. There she married the king and had Zeus’s sons—including one who became King Minos, father of the Minotaur.

This is one of two versions of the subject by Watts, both of which he worked on for decades (COMWG2007.393a). Mary noted 

This picture is one which forms an example of the great difficulty of assigning Mr Watts’ work with precision to any date. Its design may well belong to the early sixties when it was carried far, but in the late nineties it was often upon his easel again, and much of the surface work belongs to that time [1].

Watts often started paintings in the 1860s and 1870s and then worked on them on and off, or set them aside for many years. A sheet of sketches drawn on the back of an invitation dated 29 October 1869 includes one small drawing of a woman clinging to the neck of a cow, the primary iconographic element of the myth of Europa. It suggests that the idea for the painting as developing in the last years of the 1860s. Mary also suggested that the other version, now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, may have been designed alongside or during his work on the frescoes at 7 Carlton House Terrace [2].

The subject, the Phoenician princess Europa being carried off by Zeus in the form of a white bull, is first mentioned in the Iliad, and is more fully developed in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a key source for Watts’s mythological subjects [3]. Zeus, in one of his fits of lust for a woman who did not ask for his attention, turned himself into a pure white bull and hid among Europa’s father’s herd of cattle. Europa was drawn to the lovely bull and by acting gentle and playful Zeus enticed her to climb onto his back. At that point, he ran into the sea with her on his back and swam off to the island of Crete, leaving her friends and servants crying on the shore behind her. At Crete, she became the queen by marrying Asterion, and through one of her children with Zeus, Minos, eventually she became the grandmother of the Minotaur (whom Watts also painted in 1885, as an allegory about child prostitution) [4].

In designing his picture, Watts turned to one of his favourite Old Master painters, Titian, who had painted a ‘poesie,’ or mythological fantasy painting, of the subject. The picture was originally painted for Phillip II of Spain, then used as a gift between Spain, Britain, and France, until it was acquired by John Bligh, 4th Earl of Darnley in 1816 and displayed at Cobham Hall, Kent. It was then sold to Isabella Stewart Gardner, Boston, in 1896, for £20,000. [5] Historic copies have been displayed at the Wallace Collection and the Dulwich Picture Gallery, and it was loaned to the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition in 1857, meaning Watts could have seen either the original or copies in the years before he painted his version of the subject [6].  

Watts’s painting removes much of the violence of Titian’s composition, where Europa flails on the back of the Zeus bull; instead, his Europa gently holds onto the bull’s neck and she has a fairly placid expression. However, both versions of Watts’s Europa have the same flying pinkish drapery, and a similar handling of the paint with an almost crumbly appearance, especially in the hair of the bull. Watts explicitly connected his interest in a dry oil paint with very little medium to Titian’s painting practice. Mary recorded in the Annals Watts saying, ‘If there was any secret known to the old masters, it was that they used their paints as stiffly ground as mine are now.’ She ‘asked him if the old masters did not perhaps get that sharpness more easily because of their use of resins Venetian turpentine, for instance. He thought not, as Boscini records that Titian abhorred varnishes with his whole soul’ [7].

Footnotes:

[1] Mary Seton Watts, Catalogue of Subject Pictures by G.F. Watts O.M. R.A., v. I, c. 1912, p. 44.

[2] Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool, WAG 2129; Mary Seton Watts, Catalogue of Subject Pictures by G.F. Watts O.M. R.A., v. I, c. 1912, p. 44.

[3] William Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, vol 2 (Boston: C.C. Little and J. Brown, 1867), p 108; Ovid, trans. A.S. Kline, Metamorphoses Metamorphoses 2.844-875

[4] Tate, N01634.

[5] Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, P26e1.

[6] Wallace Collection, London, P5; Dulwich Picture Gallery, DPG273. The Wallace Collection version was sold twice in the 1850s in London, giving Watts ample opportunity to see it even before it entered the collection.

[7] Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: the Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1912), p. 304.

Text by Dr Melissa Gustin