Prometheus

Painting height: 66 cm
Painting width: 53.3 cm
Frame height: 97 cm
Frame width: 85 cm

Although Watts start this painting after his trip to Asia Minor and the Greek islands in 1857, Prometheus was only exhibited in May 1904. It uses elements from Greek myth but does not illustrate a single version. Prometheus was the Titan who built humans out of clay and then gave them fire. Prometheus was punished by Zeus for giving fire to humanity. He was chained to a rock and every day an eagle pecked out his liver, until he was released by Hercules. In the painting he is modelled on reclining male figures from the Parthenon and Michelangelo’s sculptures for the Medici chapel. Watts’ interpretation of Prometheus pulls from many different texts. These include Aeschylus, a fifth-century BCE Greek playwright, and modern poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Unchained, Prometheus gazes into the setting sun while ocean nymphs swirl below him.

Prometheus remained unfinished in the final year of Watts’ life and may be seen as a picture which incorporated many of the themes and forms of his body of work. Prometheus was the son of a Titan or a Titan himself, who in some Greek myth traditions modelled humans out of clay and then gave them fire. For this he was chained to a rock by Zeus and an eagle sent to peck out his liver every day (it regenerated every night).

Mary Watts noted that George began work on the idea of Prometheus soon after he returned from his trip to Asia Minor and the Greek Islands in 1857 and was still working on the canvas up until May 1904 when it was sent, still unresolved, to the New Gallery for exhibition just before his death [1]. As with many of his paintings, Prometheus relates to numerous other works in both form (COMWG2007.545a) and theme (COMWG2007.940), and is related to The Genius of Greek Poetry (COMWG.22, 1857-1878; COMWG452, 1904), Chaos (COMWG.143, 1875-1882), The Titans (COMWG.109, 1848-1875), and several works not held by the Watts Gallery. These include an early oil study in the Crowther-Oblak Collection of Victorian Art, showing Prometheus in chains surrounded by other figures, and one of the mural panels from 7 Carlton House Terrace, now at Malvern College, Worcestershire [2].

Watts’ painting shows a giant male figure reclining across a plateau, facing away from the viewer towards a darkly flaming sky. Below, smaller nude female figures rise and swirl out of the roiling sea. A photograph of the painting taken and included in Mary’s catalogue of George’s work shows a bright ring of solar flare above Prometheus, but this was painted out before George’s death [3]. Prometheus’s pose is drawn and merged from several of George’s life-long touchstones: the sculptures by Pheidias and his workshop from Parthenon pediment, of Dionysus or Theseus and the reclining river god, Michelangelo’s allegorical figures for the Medici chapel in Florence, and figures from the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Last Judgement in the Vatican, Rome. Of Michelangelo and Pheidias Watts wrote, ‘I am not Michael Angelo, but I am a pupil of the greatest sculptor of all, Pheidias’ [4].

While the subject of Prometheus comes from ancient Greece, Watts’ interpretation of the myth builds on the poem Prometheus Unbound by Percy Bysshe Shelley [5]. Shelley’s poem in turn is his vision and retelling of Aeschylus’ cycle of tragedies about Prometheus, the first of which, Prometheus Bound, exist, while the second and third plays are known only through fragments.  Nor was Shelley alone in responding to Aeschylus; in the twenty or so years leading up to Watts visiting Asia Minor and beginning the long work on Prometheus, no fewer than five verse translations were published (including by Henry Thoreau and Elizabeth Barrett Browning) while after 1857 and before Watts’ death, a further eleven translations appeared, not including poetic reinterpretations like Shelley’s and James Allan, with whom Watts communicated about Allan’s Prometheus Unbound in 1891 [6].

Watts’ painting brings elements of Aeschylus’ play to the visual field: in Prometheus Bound, Prometheus, while chained, tells his story to a group of Oceanids. In the painting, Prometheus, no longer tied to his rock, is still surrounded by the female water spirits. Shelley’s Prometheus was attempting to bring mankind into a future where they were able to reach their human potential with less suffering—under Saturn, the father of Zeus/Jupiter, humanity was happy but stagnating and unable to grow, while under Zeus, humanity was oppressed by the tyranny of the gods. Watts’ belief that art could spiritually, morally, and materially improve the lives of all people, and his disillusionment with the state of the world, may be reflected in the painting out of the solar light before his death [7].

Footnotes:

[1] Mary Seton Watts, Catalogue of Subject Pictures by G.F. Watts O.M. R.A., v. I, c. 1912, p. 121; ‘Notable pictures in the May exhibitions,’ The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 5, No. 15 (Jun., 1904), p. 232

[2] Paul Crowther, ‘Study of Prometheus Unbound,’

[3] Mary Seton Watts, Catalogue of Subject Pictures by G.F. Watts O.M. R.A., v. I, c. 1912,  p. 121.

[4] Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: the Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1912), p. 74.

[5] Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts with Other Poems (C. & J. Olllier, 1820)

[6] Letter from G. F. Watts, Little Holland House to James Allan, 10 Back Path, Banff, 18 June 1891. National Portrait Gallery, GFW/1/12/9, p. 9-11

[7] Mark Bills and Barbara Bryant, G.F Watts: Victorian Visionary (London: Yale University Press, 2008) p.69

Further Reading:

James Allan, Prometheus: A Drama (London: D. Stott, 1890)

Aeschylus, trans. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Prometheus Bound, and Other Poems (New York: J.H. Francis, 1851) pp. 9-54.

Text by Dr Melissa Gustin