The Wine Bearer also known as The Water Carrier

Painting height: 53.3 cm
Painting width: 22.9 cm
Frameheight76Framewidth45

This rough sketch may have been part of a larger picture that included a group of running women. The overall picture may have shown a frenzied group of women celebrating the Greek and Roman god of wine. This figure, from the far right of the original design, shows a woman carrying a basket on her head. The title suggests the basket holds grapes or wine. She may represent a goddess or a priestess since she is more sedate than the other women. It is difficult to date this picture because Watts included similar groups of women across his whole career. It also shows the influence of Watts’s friend Frederic Leighton, who painted similar statuesque women in classical drapery. Both were inspired by their time in Italy and interest in classical mythology.

Mary Watts noted that this small, roughly painted canvas was a ‘sketch for the figure in a picture Mr. Watts hoped to have painted. The full design remains also as a sketch which he called ‘A Bacchanal’ [1]. The Watts Gallery holds two drawings (COMWG2007.639, 1865-1869) showing this composition (COMWG2007.640, 1860-1869), with a group of nude, running women facing the left edge of the page; the sketch of the whole composition described by Mary was sold at Bonhams, London in 2010 and a related drawing of five female nudes is held at the Royal Academy. [2]. Watts also painted a Bacchante (COMWG2010.1.164), or a follower of the Roman god of wine Bacchus, which was exhibited at the third Venice Biennale in 1899 [3]. The Watts works likely date to after the late 1860s, as the figures resemble Watts’s studies of Mary Bartley, the housemaid at Little Holland House known as Long Mary (COMWG.180, 1860 [4]. There is a strong similarity to the group of paintings Watts made of Olympus on Ida (COMWG.60, 1885) or the Judgement of Paris (COMWG2007.843, 1874), particularly in the way the same figure seems to be rotated in space and posed with only slight changes.

The title of the work, The Wine Bearer, distinguishes this figure from the rest of the bacchantes in the larger composition. Unlike the frenzied, running, nude women who precede her in the action, this figure is sedate, balancing a basket that presumably holds wine or grapes. The pose derives from sculptures of caryatids, such as the one taken from the Erechtheion of the Acropolis in Athens along with the Parthenon sculptures at the British Museum as well as images on Greek vases of women carrying baskets or jars of water on their heads. [5]. Watts’s friend and neighbour Frederic Leighton produced a major work using the visual trope of women carrying jars on their heads in Captive Andromache, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1888 and now at the Manchester Art Gallery [6]. The basket-carrying figure in the bacchanal may be Watts’s own invention, bringing together the statuesque, draped figure drawn from antique sculpture and Leighton’s similar classical paintings.

Watts also seems to have lowered the stakes of the bacchanal as a subject; his running women and sedate wine carrier do not hold knives or staffs, nor are they overtly threatening the lives of local wildlife or men, as depicted on many antique reliefs and in Euripides’ Bacchae [7]. In the Bacchae, Pentheus, a Greek king, denies the power and godhead of Dionysus. In punishment, Dionysus drives the women of the city, including Pentheus’s mother, to ecstatic frenzy in the wilderness; they eventually rip Pentheus to pieces thinking he is a deer. The composition may have been an excuse to experiment with the female nude in motion and the contrast between the draped and nude figure. The bacchante or maenad, or groups of these women, were a relatively popular subject in the later nineteenth century, allowing artists to paint wild, partially clothed women behaving far outside the boundaries of Victorian social norms, or the aftermath of such activities, like Laurence Alma-Tadema’s Women of Amphissa [8].

Footnotes:

[1] Mary Seton Watts, Catalogue of Subject Pictures by G.F. Watts O.M. R.A., v. I, c. 1912,  p. 161.

[2] Bonhams, London, 19^th Century Paintings, lot 99, 29 September 2010;  Royal Academy, London, inv. 02/1089

[3] Mary Seton Watts, Catalogue of Subject Pictures by G.F. Watts O.M. R.A., v. I, c. 1912,   p. 14; sold at Sotheby’s, London, Victorian and Edwardian Art, lot 65, 15 November 2011.

[4] A survey of the Brinsley Ford collection places the group oil sketch in the 1860s because of the clear impact of the Long Mary studies. Brinsley Ford & John Christian. The Sixtieth Volume of the Walpole Society: 'The Ford Collection.' Vol. II, London: The Walpole Society, 1998, cat. RBF509.

[5] British Museum, 1816,0610.128; An influential vase showing Athenian women filling their vessels at the Kallirhoe fountain was acquired by the British Museum in 1868, which may have influenced Leighton’s Captive Andromache. British museum, 1868,0610.3.

[6] Manchester Art Gallery, inv. 1889.2; Royal Academy, The exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1888. The 120th., London, cat. 227.

[7] Euripides, trans. T. A. Buckley, The Tragedies of Euripides: Bacchae (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1850).

[8] Clark Institute of Art, 1978.12.

Text by Dr Melissa Gustin