Plaster Study of the Standing Male Nude, possibly Early Study for the Figure of Orpheus for the Oil Painting 'Orpheus and Eurydice' on a Square Base

work height: 33 cm
work width: 22 cm
work depth: 16 cm

This plaster model probably shows an early sketch for the figure of Orpheus in Watts’s painting Orpheus and Eurydice. The model shows the influence of Edward Burne-Jones’s watercolour Phyllis and Demophoön, which had caused a scandal when it was exhibited in 1870. People were upset by the sexual aggression of the woman and the man’s passivity and nudity. The woman’s face was also recognisable as Burne-Jones’s lover, Maria Zambaco. Watts’s use of plaster sculptures, rather than real people, helped remove that problem for him. The genders have been swapped between Burne-Jones’s picture and Watts’s. In Orpheus and Eurydice, Watts showed the active Orpheus trying to hold onto the swooning Eurydice, who is being dragged back to the underworld.

Watts painted multiple (COMWG.79, 1872-1877) versions (COMWG.134) of the subject of Orpheus and Eurydice and produced several (COMWG2007.969) plaster (COMWG2007.976) models (COMWG2007.948) to use for his paintings; the Watts Gallery holds two versions of the painting and several drawings [1]. This model seems to be an extremely early model, facing the opposite direction from the finished work and with an even stronger sense of movement and twist. The subject was drawn from several Roman authors, including Virgil and Ovid [2]. Orpheus, a son of the god Apollo, married Eurydice, a human woman of exceptional beauty. Their marriage was prophesied to not be long, however, and shortly after their wedding Eurydice was bitten by a snake and died. Orpheus couldn’t handle that and entered the underworld to try and get her back, using his semi-divine powers of music learned from his father to make his way into the realm of the dead. There, he made a deal with Hades and Persephone that he would get his wife back if he followed only one simple rule: he could not look back at Eurydice until they both cleared the surface.

However, Orpheus looked back too soon, just before they exited, and Eurydice, still a shade or a ghost, slipped back down into the underworld. Orpheus was distraught and tried to return to Hades for another attempt, but could not as he was still alive and living humans could not enter the underworld twice. In some versions, he played his lyre and bespelled wild animals to tear him to pieces, while in others he was murdered by maenads or bacchantes, frenzied women who followed the god Dionysus, who either threw his head in the sea or kept it as a trophy.

In Watts’s paintings, Orpheus grasps at the pale, ghostly figure of Eurydice as she swoons backwards and downwards towards the land of the dead. Over the subsequent versions of the painting, Eurydice was given less and less coverage until she was fully nude, while Orpheus retained a decorous swathe of drapery. The plaster models in the Watts Gallery collection show the influence of several major works Watts could have seen in Italy and in reproduction, especially the Belvedere Torso of the Vatican Museum, especially in the attention paid to the intercostal muscles in the upper chest, and the torsion of the body seen in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s David, now at the Galleria Borghese [3]. This version seems to be an early model, showing an extreme degree of twist and motion that the finished painting tones down.

Footnotes:

[1] Other public collections in the UK with versions include the Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool, WAG 2111 and Aberdeen Art Galleries and Museums ABDAG003030.

[2] Ovid, trans. A.S. Klein, The Metamorphoses (2000) 10.1-85 Virgil, trans. J. B. Greenough, Bucolics, Aeneid, and Georgics of Vergil. (Boston: Ginn & Co. 1900) 4.453.

[3] Vatican Museums inv.  1192; Galleria Borghese, inv. LXXVII.

Further Reading:

Mark Bills and Barbara Bryant, G.F. Watts Victorian Visionary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) pp. 192-3.

Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Between Homer and Ovid: metamorphoses of the ‘grand style’ in G.F. Watts,’ Representations of G.F. Watts: Art Making in Victorian Culture, ed. Colin Trodd and Stephanie Brown (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004) pp. 49-64.

Text by Dr Melissa Gustin