Green Summer

Painting height: 167.6 cm
Painting width: 88.9 cm
Frame height: 201 cm
Frame width: 122.9 cm

Painted from a window at Limnerslease, this study shows how the land around Limnerslease inspired Watts. The artist sent it to be exhibited at the New Gallery in 1903. In a review of the exhibition The Times noted that the landscape study encouraged viewers to ‘cast about for some phrase of the great poets that corresponds with it.’

This landscape, created in the final year of the life of G.F. Watts provides many insights into his thoughts and creation processes. In the second volume of The Annals of an Artist’s Life Mary Watts shared her recollections of this work including George’s process. She wrote, “there was not abatement of the zeal for work during the last year (1903-4). He had said ‘The desire in me to paint landscape grows, I want to paint landscape more and more’; and from his studio window he painted the picture which he afterwards called ‘Green Summer.” [1] Here Mary not only details how George continued to be inspired and paint late into his life, but also shares the location that he based this work upon which also served as the location for his painting A Parasite (COMWG.135, 1903) [2].

Later in this same volume of The Annals of an Artist’s Life Mary also shared George’s process of creating this work and his thoughts on creating paintings. She wrote:

He worked upon it from time to time, for five or six years, and as we breakfasted there one morning during the last months, I realised how that familiar scene revealed itself anew to me on the canvas.  He answered my thought by saying: ‘That is the result of going all over it again and again. If it could be done all at once with a dexterous swish of colour, you would not have anything that was not apparent at once. You get the breathing quality which is in fact our atmosphere, for beyond it there s no such thing as living and breathing for us [3].

This demonstrates how Watts not only returned to landscape painting from time to time including late in his life, but also worked on some paintings over the course of several years.  Moreover, it demonstrates the care and work he placed into his works in order to create qualities he valued.

Watts received praise on this work since he first exhibited it at the New Gallery in 1903. At the time the critic Roger Fry noted it as true and brilliant and compared it to the background of St Jude by Titian [4]. Critics have also noted the unusual subject of this landscape which includes a dead tree and note how few other landscape paintings include similar subjects [5].

Footnotes:

[1]    Mary Watts, The Annals of an Artist’s Life Volume 2, pages 312.

[2]    Veronica Franklin Gould and Hilary Underwood, “66. The Parasite c. 1895-1903,” The Vision of G.F. Watts (ed. Veronica Franklin Gould), page 72.

[3]   Mary Watts, The Annals of an Artist’s Life Volume 2, pages 312-313.

[4]   Veronica Franklin Gould and Hilary Underwood, “67. Green Summer c 1895-1903,” The Vision of G.F. Watts (ed. Veronica Franklin Gould), page 72.

[5]   Hilary Underwood, “29 Green Summer c. 1895-1903,” Painting the Cosmos: Landscapes by G.F. Watts (ed. Allen Staley and Hilary Underwood), page 58.

Text by Dr Ryan Nutting

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