Clytie also known as Sunflower

Painting height: 61 cm
Painting width: 51 cm
Frame height: 80 cm
Frame width: 70 cm

Watts’s painting of the sea-nymph Clytie shows her twisting away from the viewer to face the setting sun. In the top right corner, a sunflower indicates the subject of the painting: Clytie, in love with the sun, turned into a flower over the course of nine days and nights. In ancient myths this was a heliotrope, a small purple flower that turns to follow the sun, but in the nineteenth century this became the yellow sunflower. The painting is closely related to the bronze and marble busts of the same subject. The painting shows a nude woman in the same pose as the sculpture, although without the large leaves around her arms. William Michael Rossetti, a friend of Watts’s, described the painting as ‘perhaps his most vigorous piece of flesh-painting.’ It was never displayed in his lifetime.

Watts’s oil painting Clytie shows the same figure as the sculpture of the same name (COMWG2008.152, 1865-1869), viewed from the front with a yellow sunflower at the top left corner. The erupting, twisting form of Clytie, which are consistent across the bronze, oil painting, and chalk drawing, were reportedly inspired by Watts’s favourite model, Mary ‘Long Mary’ Bartlett (COMWG.180, 1860), a housemaid at Little Holland House in the 1860s [1]. Far from being a portrait of Mary, Clytie combined the motion and bodies of three quite distinct people: Long Mary, Angelo Colarossi, a famous and extremely handsome Italian man who was a professional model in London, and the wiggling three-year-old Margaret Burne-Jones trying to escape her mother’s arms [2]. By contrast, Mrs Russell (Emilie) Barrington suggested that the inspiration for the sculpture was the collapse of Watts’s marriage to Ellen Terry, which according to her gave the work its expressive power [3].

The story of Clytie is one of the tragic episodes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a source for many of Watts’s classical and mythological subjects [4]. Clytie was a sea-nymph who fell in love with the sun god. This god is often named as Apollo but in Ovid’s Latin was Solis, or Sol, a conflation of Apollo, the Greek and Roman god of sun and light more generally, and Helios, who embodied the sun itself and was responsible for the movement from East to West [5]. Clytie was the god’s lover until he fell in love with another woman, Leucothoe, a Persian princess. Sol snuck into Leucothoe’s rooms in disguise and started an affair with her, but in a fit of jealousy Clytie told Leucothoe’s father who then buried his daughter alive. The god transformed the dead Leucothoe into the frankincense tree, foreshadowing Clytie’s fate.

When her lover wouldn’t take her back, Clytie sat on the ground for nine days and nights, only moving her head to watch the passage of the sun; she sank into the earth and became the heliotrope, a little purple flower that turns to follow the sun. This was emphatically not the North American sunflower often described or shown in modern depictions of Clytie, including in Watts’s painting, because sunflowers were not introduced into Europe until the sixteenth century [6]. Modern cultivated sunflowers, such as Watts’s, are largely the product of Russian breeding for oil production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries [7].

William Michael Rossetti referred to Clytie in his diary after a visit to the Prinseps’ house with Dante Gabriel Rossetti in July 1869: ‘Watts’s Endymion, Daphne, Millais, Clytie (same composition in painting as the bust, perhaps his most vigorous piece of flesh-painting)’ [8]. It is difficult to unpick whether the painting or the sculpture came first; Julia Dudkiewicz has noted that the first reference to the painting is Rossetti’s diary entry [9]. However, in composition and colouring it is closely related to Watts’s Wife of Pluto, which Mary noted was likely begun in 1865 at the same time as the sculpture, so it is probable that Watts was working on the oil for Clytie in roughly the same period [10]. The painting was never displayed publicly during Watts’s lifetime.

Watts’s Clytie works (in bronze (COMWG2008.152, 1865-1869), marble, oil, and on paper (COMWG2007.398; COMWG.352 1860-1869), as well as Mary Watts’s Compton (COMWG2007.1075) Pottery (COMWG2007.126) copies (COMWG2007.177) reflect Watts’s interest not only in Ovid and classical mythology but in scientific theories of evolution, including around botanic studies. Katie Faulkner has pointed to Charles Darwin’s work on plants and movement as a key point of information for Watts [11]. Darwin published ‘The movements and habits of climbing plants’ in 1865, right when Watts was working on Clytie; this essay described plants in constant motion, especially the ways plants turn towards sources of light and heat [12]. Watts was interested in Darwin’s work and had expressed to Darwin’s son that he would have liked to paint his portrait [13].

Footnotes:

[1] Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: the Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1912), p. 45.

[2] Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: the Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1912), p. 45.

[3] In relation to the marble version, Barrington wrote:

In the finest piece of sculpture Watts ever achieved, the bust of “Clytie,” again it was an echo of the dramatic feeling of the same sitter which gave value to the conception and inspired the working of the marble, which Watts chiselled himself.

This is implied to be Ellen Terry. Mrs. Russell Barrington, George Frederic Watts, Reminiscences (London, 1905), p. 36; other authors repeat this supposition following R.E. Gutch, ‘Watts’s Sculpture,’ The Burlington Magazine Vol. 110, No. 789 (Dec., 1968), p. 694.

[4] Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Between Homer and Ovid: Metamorphoses of the ‘Grand Style’ in G. F. Watts,’ in Representations of G.F. Watts: Art Making in Victorian Culture, ed. Colin Trodd and Stephanie Brown (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 49-64

[5] Ovid, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G.P. Goold, Metamorphoses, Volume I: Books 1-8. Loeb Classical Library 42. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), pp. 194-7; for a translation available to Watts, see Ovid, trans. Alexander Pope et al, Ovid / translated by Dryden, Pope, Congreve, Addison and others, vol. 1 (London: A.J. Valpy, 1833) pp. 105-8.

[6] Charles B. Heiser, Jr., ‘The Origin and Development of the Cultivated Sunflower,’ The American Biology Teacher, vol. 17, no. 5 (May, 1955), p. 165

[7] Charles B. Heiser, Jr., ‘The Origin and Development of the Cultivated Sunflower,’ The American Biology Teacher, vol. 17, no. 5 (May, 1955), p. 166.

[8] William Michael Rossetti, Rossetti Papers 1862 to 1870 (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1903) p. 403.

[9] Julia Dudkiewicz, ‘Clytie,’ in G.F. Watts Victorian Visionary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) p. 160.

[10] Mary Seton Watts, Complete Catalogue of Subject Pictures, p. 160.

[11] Katie Faulkner, Metamorphosis in the Sculpture of G F Watts: Clytie (1868-78), unpublished MA Thesis, 2009, Watts Gallery—Artists’ Village archive.

[12] Charles Darwin, ‘The movements and habits of climbing plants,’ Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, vol 9, iss. 33-34 (June 1865) pp. 1-118.

[13] Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: the Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1912), p. 142.

Further Reading:

R.E. Gutch, ‘Watts’s Sculpture,’ The Burlington Magazine Vol. 110, No. 789 (Dec., 1968), pp. 693-99.

Gordon S. Haight, ‘George Eliot and Watts’s Clytie,’ The Yale University Library Gazette, Vol. 56, No. 3/4 (April 1982), pp. 65-9.

Lene Østermark-Johansen, ‘Serpentine Rivers and Serpentine Thought: Flux and Movement in Walter Pater's Leonardo Essay,’ Victorian Literature and Culture , 2002, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2002), pp. 455-482.

Charles Ricketts, ‘Watts at Burlington House,’ The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 6, No. 23 (Feb., 1905), pp. 346-350.

William Michael Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868, (London: John Camden Hotten, 1868).

Text by Dr Melissa Gustin