Prodigal Son

Painting height: 109.2 cm
Painting width: 78.8 cm
Frame height: 138 cm
Frame width: 108 cm

In this work, one of two Watts created around the same time centred on this story, Watts depicts the parable of the prodigal son as depicted in Luke 15:11-32. In this story one of two sons asked for his inheritance from his father, but then squandered it and returns home destitute intending to ask to be accepted back as servant. Instead the father is welcomed back not in scorn, but with great fanfare. Watts shows the Prodigal Son from the parable seated next to a rock in a prehistorical, arid landscape. His clothes are in tatters, his feet are bare, and his features are gaunt from starvation. A vast landscape of blue-green hills stretches out behind him.

The painter and art critic Roger E Fry (1866-1934) of the Bloomsbury Group considered Watts’s ’great triumph’ to be his work in historical, mythological, and landscape painting [1]. ‘One or two of his biblical scenes will also stand out as memorable interpretations’ Fry wrote in 1905 [2]. Among them, he included Prodigal Son and Jacob and Esau (COMWG.25, 1878). Roger Fry was especially impressed by Watts’s work in landscape painting, and these two biblical pictures feature striking Biblical unforgiving hilly landscapes in otherworldly violet, blue, and green tones. The Prodigal Son rests next to a rock. A swine rests on the ground next to him. Part of the Prodigal Son’s punishment was to become a swineherd, after he had wasted his father’s gifts through ‘riotous living’ Luke15:11-32.

This tendency to present a small group or single figures within a landscape was favoured by other artists of the period too, such as in the work of Paul Falconer Poole (1807-1879), who also painted the despair of the Prodigal Son before his repentance a year before Watts showed his work (1869, Laing Art Gallery Collection). 1869 saw three of Watts’s contemporaries attempt the Biblical theme in the work of the aforementioned Poole, Edward Poynter’s The Prodigal’s Return (1869), and William Gale’s The Return of the Prodigal. Every other year throughout the nineteenth century a painting or sculpture that took inspiration from the Parable of the Prodigal Son was shown at the Royal Academy.

Just as Watts’s Biblical women were often portrayed in innovative ways, so too is his depiction of the Prodigal Son quite rare. A more frequent scene to be portrayed in art was that of the son’s return, as in Sir John Millais’ wood engraving The Prodigal Son (1864) for the Dalziel Brothers’ Bible, to which Watts was also a contributor. It was a popular theme with sculptors, such as William Calder Marshall’s The Prodigal Son (1881, at Tate), and painters, such as Watts’s protégé Louisa Anne Beresford, Lady Waterford, who Watts ranked as ‘one of the greatest artists’, the painter John Macallan Swan (1846-1910), and the Scottish portraitist Harrington Mann (1864-1937) [3]. But Watts’s Prodigal Son is perhaps most reminiscent of earlier paintings by William Etty.

In 1870-71, Watts’s Prodigal Son was exhibited in aid of the distressed peasantry of France as a result of the Franco-Prussian War at an exhibition at the Gallery of the Society of British Artists, Suffolk Street, Pall Mall which opened on the 17th of December in 1870 [4]. Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington, Miss Burdett Coutts, and Lady Eastlake, among others, loaned paintings. Artists, such as Princess Louise, G. F. Watts, Frederic Leighton, and E. M. Ward contributed works to be sold. It was hoped the exhibition would raise £5000. In the Athenaeum ‘the fine and pathetic head, by Mr. Watts, of a young man, with a worn face, styled The Prodigal Son’ was mentioned among the pictures that claimed, ‘high applause’ [5]. Yet, two years later the journal The Builder reported that Watts was ‘not so fortunate as to secure great interest for his version of “The Prodigal”’ at the Royal Academy Exhibition [6].

In 1874, it was exhibited at the Liverpool Corporation Autumn Exhibition of Pictures and mentioned along with A. Elmore’s Lenore and H. O’Neil’s A Volunteer as the ‘weird-pictures’ [7]. However, the reviewer concluded that ‘the quality fully compensates for their sombre tone’ [8]. As Dante Gabriel Rossetti once remarked to Edward Burne-Jones before the latter’s first visit to Little Holland House, ‘You must know these people Ned; they are remarkable people: you will see a painter there, he paints a queer sort of pictures about God and Creation’ [9].

In 1882, it was shown at the Winter Exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery of Watts’s oeuvre where it was included among a group of Biblical subjects which included Esau (COMWG.129, 1860-65), Jacob and Esau (COMWG.25, 1878), as well as ‘the significant figure of The Prodigal Son [10].

Explore:

Prodigal Son (COMWG.44)

Footnotes: 

[1]    Roger E. Fry ‘Watts and Whistler’, in The Quarterly Review 202.403 (Apr 1905), pp. 607-623, pp. 619-620.

[2]    Ibid., p. 620.

[3]   Arthur Fish, ‘Pictures of the Parables. The Prodigal Son.’ In Quiver 985 (Jan 1903), pp. 566-571, p. 570.

[4]   Anon. ‘Exhibition in Aid of the Distressed Peasantry of France’, in The Art Journal vol. 10 (1871), pp. 50-51. See also, Anon. ‘Fine-Art Gossip’ in the Athenaeum 2248 (Nov 26, 1870), pp. 694-695.

[5]   Anon. ‘Exhibition for the Benefit of the Distressed Peasantry of France, Suffolk Street’, in the Athenaeum 2252 (Dec 24, 1870), pp. 846-847, p. 847.

[6]   Anon. ‘Another Visit to the Royal Academy Exhibition’, in The Builder 31.1580 (1873), pp. 377-378, p. 377.

[7]    Anon. ‘Liverpool Corporation Autumn Exhibition of Pictures’, in The Art Journal vol. 13 pp. 334-335, p. 334.

[8]   Ibid., p. 334.

[9]   Quoted in Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones Vol I 1833-1867 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1904), p. 159.

[10] Anon. ‘Art Chronicle’ in The Portfolio 13 (Jan 1882), pp. 42-45, p. 44.

Text by Dr Eva-Charlotta Mebius