Chaos

Painting height: 104 cm
Painting width: 317.5 cm
Frame height: 136 cm
Frame width: 348 cm

Chaos shows Watts’s vision of the beginnings of earth and time. At the left, figures crawl from under rocks and emerge out of fire. At the centre, a massive figure slides up from the water and moves towards a group of reclining giants. Below the giants, a trail of small people in classical drapery symbolise the measure of regular human time against cosmic and geological time. Watts did not illustrate a single culture’s creation myth. Instead, he showed his own ideas of order and time at the beginning of the world. It was conceived as the ‘first chapter’ of Watts’s House of Life scheme of paintings, showing the origins of the universe and the course of history and human life. Watts made plaster sketches of the figures to the left of the canvas to use as models, and many of the figures appear in multiple paintings.

Mary Seton Watts records two very different modes of thought by which George Frederic Watts conceived and developed Chaos. The first, as part of his series of works contemplating the nature of time, earth, and the cosmos, where

Silence and Mighty Repose should be stamped upon the character and disposition of the giants; and revolving centuries and cycles should glide, personified by female figures of great beauty, beneath the crags upon which the mighty forms should lie, to indicate (as compared with the effect upon man and his works) the non-effect of time upon them [1].

The second, by contrast, has Mary recalling

And I am here reminded that Signor told me that the giant figures of the reposing continents in his picture of “Chaos” were suggested to him when looking at the cracks and stains on the dirty plaster of a wall. He saw the whole composition mentally, and carried it out years afterwards [2].

Watts’s ability to see ‘a world in a grain of sand,’ or the origins of the world in cracked and stained plaster fuelled his grand plans for the House of Life mural scheme [3]. This ultimately unfulfilled plan nevertheless produced four versions of Chaos, although Watts was never satisfied with that title and regretted not calling it ‘Cosmos’ after gifting a version to the National Gallery of British Art, now Tate Britain. [4] Two smaller oil studies are held at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge [5]. Watts worked on the House of Life and Chaos for years; the idea seems to have developed as early as 1850. Preliminary drawings for the various groups are held at the WGAV, as are studies in plaster that Watts created for the emerging forms at the left of the picture.

The painting reads from left to right, with the massive figures of giants emerging from a fiery indeterminacy, the titular chaos; the centre shows an elongated figure with its back to the viewer sliding from the primordial waters towards the rocky earth. There, a ribbon of feminine figures dances below the crags where the silent and mighty giants repose. The poses of the giants are drawn from the reclining male figures on the Parthenon pediments, models to which Watts returned again and again and of which he owned reduced casts, displayed in his studio.  The quotation of the Parthenon figures allowed Watts to connect his own vision of the cosmos and creation to what were seen as some of the pinnacles of Greek art.

While Watts did not see the paintings as an illustration of a singular myth of creation, the title Chaos is derived from the name of a primordial Greek persona who could be interpreted in various ways: the undifferentiated matter before Earth and the elements separated, the lower air (i.e. that of earth, rather than the heavens), or the underworld and the mother of darkness and night. Ovid’s Metamorphosis, from which Watts drew many of his subjects, positions Chaos as the unified mass: ‘Before the sea was, and the lands, and the sky that hangs over all, the face of Nature showed alike in her whole round, which state men have called chaos: a rough, unordered mass of things, nothing at all save lifeless bulk and warring seeds of ill-matched elements heaped in one’ [6]. The darkness and matter were separated by Chronos (Time) [7].

Explore:

Pen and Ink Compositional Sketch for 'Chaos' (COMWG2007.633)

Chalk Figure of Foreshortened Reclining Nude (COMWG2007.658)

Plaster Study of a Male Nude Under a Rock for the Painting 'Chaos (COMWG2007.942.1)

Small Plaster Study of a Reclining Make nude for the Painting 'Chaos' (COMWG2007.942.2)

Small Plaster Study of a Reclining Nude for the Painting 'Chaos' (COMWG2007.942.3)

Small Plaster Study of a Reclining Male Bearded Nude Figure for the Painting 'Chaos' (COMWG2007.942.4)

The Titans (COMWG.109)

Prometheus (COMWG.28)

The Battle of the Gods and the Giants (COMWG2006.56)

Footnotes:

[1] Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: the Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1912), p. 102.

[2] Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: the Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. 2 (London: MacMillan and Co., Ltd, 1912) p. 105.

[3] William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence,’ c. 1803; first pub. Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake "Pictor ignotus": with selections from his poems and other writings, vol. 2, p. 94.

[4] MSW 1.102 n.1; Tate Gallery N01647.

[5] Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, inv. 4016; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, WAG 2097

[6] Ovid, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G.P. Goold, Metamorphoses, Volume I: Books 1-8 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1916), p. 3.

[7] Ovid, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G.P. Goold, Metamorphoses, Volume I: Books 1-8 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1916), p. 3.

Text by Dr Melissa Gustin