Endymion

Painting height: 104.1 cm
Painting width: 121.9 cm
Frame height: 136.7 cm
Frame width: 157.5 cm
Frame depth: 6 cm

Watts painted two versions of this design showing Endymion, a handsome shepherd, and the moon goddess Diana. Diana loved Endymion and put him into an eternal enchanted sleep. Watts based Endymion’s pose on the reclining nude figure of Dionysus from the Parthenon. Diana’s dress also reflects Watts’s studies of the Parthenon, especially the broken and cut drapery of the female figures. Diana and Endymion together make a perfect circle on the canvas. They are emphasised by a line of light around Diana and the contour of Endymion’s limbs at the bottom of the canvas. Mary recalled saying to George, ‘Oh, Signor, what a dream for him to have!’ Watts replied, ‘Yes, but it was only moonshine after all.’ The canvas for this painting was started in the 1860s but Watts did not work on it until 1903. It was only exhibited in April 1904, a few months before he died.

Watts painted several editions of this design for the subject Endymion. Mary Watts noted in the Annals that at the end of his life, Watts returned to the design (COMWG2007.679b), which he had laid in in the 1860s:

One morning I went in to find that in the early hours of the day Signer had taken up the canvas upon which in the late 'sixties he had laid in an out- line of his "Endymion." The small version, so well known by reproductions, being sculpturesque and definite, he had decided to make this larger picture visionary and mystic, the moon goddess only luminously visible. When first I saw it I exclaimed in surprise, 'Oh, Signor, what a dream for him to have!' and he answered with a half-regretful smile, 'Yes, but it was only moonshine after all.' [1].

Mary’s catalogue of George’s work notes that he had outlined the design in 1869-70 and then it lay untouched until 1903, when ‘the canvas came again on the easel and was rapidly completed and sent for exhibition in April 1904’ [2]. In comparison to the first version, now in a private collection, Mary wrote ‘the solid sculpturesque treatment of the Wm. [William] Graham version was here changed for moonlight mystery’ [3]. Watts also painted a second, vertical composition of the same subject, the study for which is held by the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham from the Cecil French Bequest and which was photographed by Frederick Hollyer (COMWG2007.807) for Watts [4].

Endymion was an ancient Greek hero who was beloved by the goddess of the moon, who was so enamoured of his beauty that she put him to sleep forever to preserve his good looks. This was depicted in numerous antique examples of which Watts would have been aware, including a famous relief at the Capitoline Museum of Endymion and his dog (the Royal Academy and the Sir John Soane Museum also had casts of this relief) [5]. There is also a sculpture by Antonio Canova at Chatsworth House of the subject.

In Watts’s painting, Endymion’s pose is based on the reclining male figure from the Parthenon pediment known in Watts’s day as Theseus and now Dionysus. Watts drew the Parthenon sculptures repeatedly from the earliest days of his career; the Gallery holds sketchbooks with finely drawn studies from different parts of the pediments and relief friezes. Stephanie Brown has noted the connection between the figures in Endymion, particularly the first, more sculptural version, and Watts’s Ariadne (COMWG2007.811, 1867-1875), especially the draperies (COMWG2007.436a) on the seated female figure of Ariadne (COMWG2007.847, 1888) and the dense pleating and folds of Diana’s robes in Endymion [6].

The Watts Gallery’s version of Endymion was sent to exhibition only months before Watts died in July 1904. A review of the exhibition in the Athenaeum described it as having ‘a certain Blake-like mystery and intensity.’ [7]. Displayed opposite A Fugue (COMWG.158, 1900-1904), which depicts a storm of chubby babies swirling upwards against a sunset, the Endymion presented the more classical, abstracting side of Watts’s late work. The Athenaeum reviewer continued, ‘In the “Endymion,” the spirit of the Moon Goddess, huge, pale, ad dimly seen, broods over her recumbent lover with an insistence that is almost terrible’ [8].

If the earlier version of the Endymion subject was more sculptural, the later, freer version of the design played more with Watts’s interest in dissolving the figure and ground relationship. Barbara Bryant notes:

[the] oil paint is handled like pastel, the dry medium of each pure colour unmixed and dragged over the surface to create effects of scattered light, allowing the forms themselves to appear as constructs of light, devoid of material form.’[8].

The moon goddess Diana here dissolves against the background of the night sky, surrounded by a pale outline like the halo around then moon on a clear cold night. This nearly perfect circle continues to follow the contour of Endymion’s body, so that although the two figures do not seem to touch one another they are unified within the sphere of moonlight.

Footnotes:

[1] Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: the Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1912), p. 313.

[2] Mary Seton Watts, Catalogue of Subject Pictures by G.F. Watts O.M. R.A., v. I, c. 1912, p. 42.

[3] Mary Seton Watts, Catalogue of Subject Pictures by G.F. Watts O.M. R.A., v. I, c. 1912, p. 42.

[4] See "Endymion" by George Frederic Watts 

[5] Musei Capitolini, inv. S 503; Royal Academy 03/2016; Sir John Soane Museum, London, M279.

[6] Stephanie Brown, ‘Watts and Sculpture,’ in G.F. Watts: Victorian Visionary, eds. Mark Bills and Barbara Bryant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) p. 61

[7] "The New Gallery," The Athenaeum 3991 (23 April 1904), p. 536-537. 

[8] "The New Gallery," The Athenaeum 3991 (23 April 1904), p. 536-537. 

[9] Barbara Bryant, ‘Endymion,’ in in G.F. Watts: Victorian Visionary, eds. Mark Bills and Barbara Bryant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), cat. 81, p. 278.

Further Reading:

G.K. Chesterton, G.F. Watts (London: Duckworth, 1904).

Text by Dr Melissa Gustin