Orpheus and Eurydice

Painting height: 66 cm
Painting width: 38.1 cm
Frame height: 90 cm
Frame width: 64 cm

One of several versions of this subject Watts painted over the years, this large but subdued picture shows the nude ghost of Eurydice swooning in Orpheus’s arms as she is pulled back into the underworld. Orpheus was the son of Apollo and a skilled musician. At his marriage to Eurydice, another god foretold that their marriage wouldn’t last. Soon after, Eurydice was bitten by a snake and died. Orpheus went to the underworld to retrieve her soul, which he was allowed to do on the condition he did not look back at her until they were both above the surface. However, he looked back too soon and she was returned to the land of the dead. This is the moment Watts has depicted.

Watts painted multiple versions of the subject of Orpheus and Eurydice and produced several (COMWG2007.948) plaster models (COMWG2007.969) to use for his paintings; the Watts Gallery holds two versions of the painting, several drawings (COMWG2007.900, 1900), and the models (COMWG2007.976); other versions of the paintings are held in international collections including a horizontal, sketchy version at the Walker Art Gallery and a large, highly finished early version at Aberdeen [1].

Like many of his mythological pictures, Watts took the subject from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (among others) [2]. Orpheus, a son of the god Apollo, married Eurydice, a human woman of exceptional beauty. Their marriage was prophesied to not be long, however, and shortly after their wedding Eurydice was bitten by a snake and died. Orpheus couldn’t handle that and entered the underworld to try and get her back, using his semi-divine powers of music learned from his father to make his way into the realm of the dead. There, he made a deal with Hades and Persephone that he would get his wife back if he followed only one simple rule: he could not look back at Eurydice until they both cleared the surface. But Orpheus did look back, because he could not hear her footsteps, and Eurydice, still a shade or a ghost, slipped back down into the underworld. Orpheus tried to return to Hades for another attempt, but could not as he was still alive and living humans could not enter the underworld twice. In some versions, he played his lyre and bespelled wild animals to tear him to pieces, while in others he was murdered by maenads or bacchantes, frenzied women who followed the god Dionysus, who either threw his head in the sea or kept it as a trophy.

In Watts’s paintings, Orpheus grasps at the pale, ghostly figure of Eurydice as she swoons backwards and downwards towards the land of the dead. Over the subsequent versions of the painting, Eurydice was given less and less coverage until she was fully nude, while Orpheus retained a decorous swathe of drapery. This version, in which Eurydice is fully nude, has a subdued colour palette appropriate to the tragic, solemn character of the depicted myth. Her body hangs limp in Orpheus’s arms while he twists violently back to cling to her. The outline of her body is already dissolving into the dark background. In the other version (COMWG.134, 1900-1903) of the painting at the Watts Gallery, the colours are brighter and the contrast between Orpheus’s living flesh and Eurydice’s ghostly body is more obvious. 

Mary Watts noted in her complete catalogue of Watts’s works that in preparing for the Metropolitan Museum exhibition in 1884, that he wrote to Mary Gertrude Meade saying it had only just been varnished, and that this picture and Paolo and Francesca were the only two he ought to have sent as they were the only two complete pictures [3].

Footnotes:

[1] Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool, WAG 2111; Aberdeen Art Galleries and Museums ABDAG003030.

[2] Ovid, trans. A.S. Klein, The Metamorphoses (2000) 10.1-85; Virgil, trans. J. B. Greenough, Bucolics, Aeneid, and Georgics of Vergil. (Boston: Ginn & Co. 1900) 4.453.

[3] Mary Seton Watts, Catalogue of Subject Pictures by G.F. Watts O.M. R.A., v. I, c. 1912,  p. 112.

Further Reading:

Mark Bills and Barbara Bryant, G.F. Watts Victorian Visionary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) pp. 192-3.

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

Text by Dr Melissa Gustin