Thetis

Painting height: 193 cm
Painting width: 53.3 cm
Frame height: 228 cm
Frame width: 84 cm

This long, narrow painting shows a slender nude woman putting her hair up by the seaside. She is Thetis, a sea-nymph and the mother of Achilles, one of the main characters of the Iliad. Watts leaves out any of the narrative elements of the Iliad or Thetis’s myth, using only some shells on the shore to show she is a sea spirit. Watts was one of the artists in the 1860s who were interested in the female nude as a standalone subject for painting. These included Frederic, Lord Leighton, and Albert Moore. Moore’s painting A Venus was finished about the same time as Thetis. Mary Watts noted that a drawing for the painting was labelled ‘Miss Smith,’ rather than Watts’s favourite model Long Mary. Drawings of Long Mary generally show her as more muscular than the slim figure here.

This long, narrow canvas shows the sea-nymph Thetis, the mother of Achilles. Like Frederic Leighton’s later Bath of Psyche, this composition and focus on the female nude for its aesthetic and artistic potential rather than a narrative subject may derive from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s La Source (begun in 1820 in Florence but finished in 1856 in Paris) [1]. This had been exhibited in the International Exhibition of 1862 in London, where it was mostly well reviewed. Commentators described it as ‘ineffably chaste,’ suggesting that ‘every student will delight in its solid execution and admire without stint the pure and simple serenity of her face, and that it was a ‘sufficient answer to the old cant cry in England of French impurity,’ although one reviewer described its ‘invention’ as ‘stale and formal’ [2].

Watts often looked to other artists’ work for inspiration and suggestions, although the best-known instances of this are his interest in the Parthenon sculptures and paintings by Titian or Michelangelo and not the modern French artists like Ingres or Paul Delaroche, or his English peers like Albert Moore, whose painting A Venus was finished and exhibited in 1869 [3]. Watts was among a group of British artists who were, as Robyn Asleson has noted, ‘responsible for reviving the exhibition of ambitious female nudes during the 1860s,’ which included Leighton, Moore, and Edward Poynter [4]. Classical titles and accessories provided a thin narrative justification for otherwise subject-less or purely aesthetic pictures, including Thetis. However, this picture was not exhibited in Watts’s lifetime, and references to a ‘Thetis’ are either the unfinished painting or a smaller study.

Mary Watts’s catalogue of Watts’s paintings makes reference to Thetis as belonging to a group of mythological or Greek themed works upon which Watts was working in the late 1860s, including The Genius of Greek Poetry (COMWG.22, 1857-1878 and COMWG.452, 1904), Island of Cos, Ariadne in Naxos (COMWG2007.811, 1867-75  COMWG2007.847, 1888), and Daphne (COMWG2007.836, 1872) [5]. Mary’s Complete Catalogue of Subject Pictures also notes that Watts dated the painting to 1866, but that ‘he added some additional work many years later’ [6]. The subject is the sea-nymph Thetis, the mother of the Greek hero Achilles (COMWG.258.1, 1885-1886) whom Watts painted at Bowood House in a fresco (COMWG.94, 1858-1860).  Thetis’s wedding was the origin of the Trojan War and the Iliad, which Watts had loved since childhood.

Zeus, the leader of the Greek gods, took an interest in Thetis, but decided against having his way with her because of a prophecy that her son would be more famous and successful than his father. He instead orchestrated that Thetis would marry Peleus, a Greek king. At their wedding, Eris, the goddess of strife, who had not been invited, threw a golden apple inscribed ‘to the fairest’ into the crowd. This caused a fight between the three goddesses Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena, who all thought they deserved it. The three took their squabble to Paris of Troy, living as a shepherd after being abandoned on a mountainside as a baby because of a separate prophecy that he would cause the downfall of Troy. He was known as a wise and fair judge. The goddesses bribed him with various rewards for giving them the apple, but Aphrodite won by offering him Helen, the most beautiful human woman. When Paris, as a guest in the house of Helen’s husband, kidnapped (or seduced and ran off with) Helen, her husband called in the kings and princes of Greece to retrieve her from Troy and thus the Trojan War began. In the first surviving part of the Iliad, Thetis’s son Achilles is one of the main characters and his tantrum at losing a slave girl was depicted by Watts at Bowood House.

Footnotes:

[1] Tate, N01574

[2] ‘The International Exhibition-Results,’ The Athenaeum, Nov. 1 862, p. 563; ‘International Exhibition,’ The Athenaeum; May 24, 1862, p. 695; ‘The Foreign Art Galleries a the International Exhibition,’ The Gentleman's Magazine: and historical review, Sep 1862, p. 268; ‘The International Exhibition,’ The Examiner [London], Jun 7, 1862, p. 361.

[3] York Art Gallery, YORAG: 698. Robyn Asleson, Albert Moore (London: Phaidon, 2000), p. 104.

[4] Robyn Asleson, Albert Moore (London: Phaidon, 2000), p. 108.

[5] Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: the Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1912), p. 234.

[6] Mary Seton Watts, Catalogue of Subject Pictures by G.F. Watts O.M. R.A., v. I, c. 1912, p. 144.

Explore:

Arcadia (COMWG.39)

Daphne's Bath (COMWG.77)

Thetis- Nude Study (COMWG.93)

Further Reading:

Mark Bills and Barbara Bryant, G. F. Watts: Victorian Visionary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) pp. 194-5.

Text by Dr Melissa Gustin