Clytie

sculpture height: 87 cm
sculpture width: 57 cm
sculpture depth: 38 cm

This large bronze statue of a nude woman was Watts’s first successful sculpture in the round and the only one exhibited during his lifetime. Watts had a life-long interest in Greek and Roman mythology, especially those stories where people changed from one form of life to another, often human to plant or animal. Here, Clytie, a sea-nymph, is violently transforming as we watch. She was in love with the sun-god who did not love her back. She sat on the ground watching the sun from morning to night for nine days, slowly sinking into the ground until she became a heliotrope. This small purple flower moves to follow the sun from east to west. Clytie is shown erupting out of leaves, violently twisting her strong body towards the sun as she transforms. Watts may have been inspired by Michelangelo’s muscular, contorted bodies at the Sistine Chapel.

Writing to Prime Minister William Gladstone in May 1868, Watts described his intentions for his first major foray into fine-art sculpture for exhibition (rather than private working models) "My aim in this first essay has been to get flexibility, impression of colour, and largeness of character, rather than purity and gravity—qualities I own to be extremely necessary to sculpture […]" [1].

Watts’s Clytie was in part a reaction against the late stages of Victorian sentimental neoclassicism and romantic sculpture, typified by stiff and stylised academic nudes inspired by classical subjects and models, in pure white marble. The critic Algernon Swinburne connected Watts’s painting of The Wife of Pygmalion (COMWG2007.813, 1868) and the bust of Clytie, suggesting:

In this "translation" of a Greek statue into an English picture, no less than in the bust of Clytie, we see how in the hands of a great artist painting and sculpture may become as sister arts indeed, yet without invasion or confusion; how, without any forced alliance of form and colour, a picture may share the gracious grandeur of a statue, a statue may catch something of the subtle bloom of beauty proper to a picture [2].

A few pages later, Swinburne continued:

Not imitative, not even assimilative of Michel Angelo’s manner, it yet by some vague and ineffable quality brings to mind his work rather than any Greek sculptor’s,’ and finally that ‘Sculpture such as this has actual colour enough without need to borrow of an alien art [3].

The full-length female nude had lost much of its artistic daring and creative potential, with the American sculptor’s William Rinehart’s roughly contemporary vision of Clytie (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) a blank-faced and chilly nymph standing still by an imagined riverbank [4]. Although Watts’s sculpture aimed towards an ‘impression’ of having colour, he was not involved in the movement towards actual polychromy, or multicoloured statuary. Rather, Mary recorded George’s comments about the Parthenon sculptures, suggesting ‘In the best sculpture you feel the palpitations of colour, the elements of a picture; you unconsciously see it painted!’ [5].  

The muscular and contorted body was probably influenced by the frescoes and sculpture by Michelangelo which Watts had seen in Florence and Rome during his early years in Italy. The twisting Sybils and ignudi or nudes of the Sistine Ceiling were strong inspirations throughout Watts’s career, and although none of them is an exact match for Clytie, the relationship is clear. Watts cited Michelangelo approvingly throughout his life, saying of the Sistine frescoes that, ‘On the whole, as a complete work by one man, they are the greatest things existing’ [6]. On the other hand, Mary notes that Watts did not think much of Michelangelo’s sculpture, so the painted works, which he had sketched in the 1840s, were the more likely reference [7]. Critic Marion Spielmann remarked that ‘“Clytie” […] is surpassed in “bigness” and purity of style and feeling by little or nothing ever produced in England’ [8].

As a first step, Watts would have modelled the figure of Clytie in clay. The terracotta copies (COMWG2007.126 and COMWG2007.177) in the Watts Gallery—Artists’ Village collection are not this original clay model but versions produced by Mary Watts’s Compton Pottery. The clay model could then be used to make a plaster cast, from which further copies in plaster, bronze, marble, or terracotta were made. Watts carved the first marble version himself, at least in part. Watts Gallery holds an original bronze, this object, as well as a modern copy cast in 2017 by Pangolin Foundry, London, a painted plaster copy, and several Compton Potteries versions, including the garden sculpture at the entrance to the museum. Marble copies are held at the Guildhall Gallery in London and at the Manchester Art Gallery. Watts gave a plaster cast of Clytie as a gift to George Eliot, whose work he much admired; it was delivered by Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Eliot’s house January 9, 1870 [9].

Explore:

Clytie (COMWG.73)

Chalk Study for 'Clytie' (COMWG.352)

Four Ink Studies of Half-length Female Nude (COMWG2007.398)

Bust of Clytie (COMWG2007.1075)

Footnotes:

[1] G F Watts to William Gladstone, May 3, 1868, National Portrait Gallery GFW1/1/6; quoted in Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: the Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1912), p. 237.

[2] The Wife of Pygmalion is now at Buscot Park; Algernon Charles Swinburne, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868, part 2 (London: John Camden Hotten1868), p. 31.

[3] Algernon Charles Swinburne, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868, part 2 (London: John Camden Hotten, 1868), pp. 35-6.

[4] Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York inv. 11.68.1

[5] Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: the Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1912), p. 141.

[6] Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: the Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1912), p. 73.

[7] Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: the Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1912) p. 73.

[8] Marion Harry Spielmann, British Sculpture and Sculptors of To-Day (London: Cassell and Company, Limited, 1901) p. 164.

[9] Gordon S. Haight, ‘George Eliot and Watts’s Clytie,’ The Yale University Library Gazette, Vol. 56, No. 3/4 (April 1982), p. 65.

Further Reading:

Stephanie Brown, ‘Indefinite Expansion: Watts and the Physicality of Sculpture,’ in Representations of G.F. Watts: Art Making in Victorian Culture, ed. Colin Trodd and Stephanie Brown (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 83-106.

R.E. Gutch, ‘Watts’s Sculpture,’ The Burlington Magazine Vol. 110, No. 789 (Dec., 1968), pp. 693-99.

Gordon S. Haight, ‘George Eliot and Watts’s Clytie,’ The Yale University Library Gazette, Vol. 56, No. 3/4 (April 1982), pp. 65-9.

Lene Østermark-Johansen, ‘Serpentine Rivers and Serpentine Thought: Flux and Movement in Walter Pater's Leonardo Essay,’ Victorian Literature and Culture , 2002, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2002), pp. 455-482.

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

Charles Ricketts, ‘Watts at Burlington House,’ The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 6, No. 23 (Feb., 1905), pp. 346-350.

William Michael Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868, (London: John Camden Hotten, 1868).

Marion Harry Spielmann, British Sculpture and Sculptors of To-day (London: Cassell and Company, Limited, 1901) pp. 164-5.

Text by Dr Melissa Gustin