St. George and the Dragon also known as The Red Cross Knight

Painting height: 58.5 cm
Painting width: 41 cm

This oil study relates to Watts’s fresco, sometimes called St George Overcoming the Dragon, in the Upper Waiting Hall of the House of Lords at the new Palace of Westminster. Derived from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590), it formed one of eight panels in fresco by various artists decorating the ‘Poets’ Hall’. The Red Cross Knight, later revealed to be St George, protects the beautiful virgin Una, emblematic of truth and the one true religion. Book I recounts his trials, culminating in a ferocious three-day fight with the dragon that is eventually slain: ‘So down he fell, and like an heaped mountain lay’. Rather than choose an episode depicting the bloody battle of the knight and his foe, Watts paints this scene of tranquility, which relies on the classical form of a pyramidal composition. It may well be that one of the members of Sara Prinsep’s circle at Little Holland House modeled for this work. One visitor noted that Watts ‘paints nothing but idealised figures and faces of herself, and her sisters, and their children’. Text by Barbara Bryant.

The nineteenth century saw a large number of works of art from paintings to sculptures to stained-glass windows that took inspiration from Edmund Spenser’s poetry, and in particular his epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590). His popularity was ‘grounded in the perception that his heroes and heroines, often particularly the latter, exhibited the qualities of Christian commitment that were much on nineteenth-century minds’ [1]. An example of this can be seen in G. F. Watts’s paintings and fresco of Una and the Red Cross Knight (COMWG2007.802, 1869) and his paintings of Britomart and her Nurse(COMWG.29, 1865). G. F. Watts’s paintings were the product of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artistic trend that saw painters attempt to translate ‘the poetry of Spenser from print to canvas, shifting it from the perspective of the library to the sight-lines of the gallery’ [2].

This painting was painted in preparation for Watts’s fresco in the Upper Waiting Hall of the House of Lords at the new Palace of Westminster where it served as one of eight panels that decorated the Poets’ Hall. It shows the beautiful Una and the Red Cross Knight who has slayed the dragon and liberated Una’s parents. It was particularly apt for the decoration of the Palace of Westminster, since Una in nineteenth-century iconography had come to signify Queen Victoria, as seen in a gold five-pound coin, designed by William Wyon, that was struck in 1839 at the Royal Mint [3]. The Red Cross Knight, or St George the patron saint of England, who has stridently defended Una, or Queen Victoria, in Watts’s painting was probably meant to serve as a moral ideal for those in government that would frequent the Poets’ Hall.

As Spenser’s epic poem had been written to celebrate another female monarch, Queen Elizabeth, many painters thought it a suitable poem to return to as Queen Victoria ascended to the throne. Queen Victoria even added one such depiction to her private collection, the painting Una among the Fauns and Wood Nymphs (1847) by William Edward Frost (1810-1877) [4]. Another artist who was drawn to Spenser was G. F. Watts’s friend Edward Burne-Jones. Britomart was one of his favourite subjects [5].

It is possible that Lady Dalrymple, also known as Sophia Dalrymple, or her sister Sara Prinsep, was the model for Una. Around the same time, Watts was painting all the ladies of Sara and Thoby Prinsep’s circle that frequented Little Holland House. Among the portraits and drawings of this time there is a portrait of Lady Dalrymple (1851-53) in which she wears a white garment similar to that which Una wears (COMWG.200, 1851).

A later version by Watts of the same subject Una and the Red Cross Knight (1869, Art Gallery of Western Australia) was an ‘idealized and chastely painted’ vision of Spenser’s characters, as opposed to earlier erotic Spenserian works by for example William Etty [6]. The picture was shown at the Royal Academy in 1869 [7]. As in William Blake’s tempera painting The Characters in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (c. 1825) Watts painted Una riding on a donkey next to the Red Cross Knight. This is the way she is introduced in Book One of The Faerie Queene.

Virginia Woolf’s aunt, Mary Fisher (née Jackson), was the model for Una (see the photograph by Frederic Hollyer (COMWG2007.802, 1869). Mary Louisa Fisher (1841-1916), like her sister Julia Leslie Stephen, also modelled for Watts’s friend and protégé the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Virginia Woolf once referred to the painting of Mary Louisa as Una as ‘Aunt Mary on a donkey’ [8]. In 1880, Watts painted the historian Herbert William Fisher and Mary Fisher’s daughter Miss Florence Fisher (COMWG2007.768, 1880). Their daughter went on to become a playwright and married Frederic William Maitland. Her second marriage was to the botanist Sir Francis Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, in 1913 when she became known as Florence Henrietta Darwin, Lady Darwin.

Footnotes:

[1]    See Norman K. Farmer, Jr ‘Illustrators’ in The Spenser Encyclopedia ed by A. C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 388-392, p. 390.

[2]    Norman K. Farmer, Jr. ‘“A Moniment Forever More” The Faerie Queene and British Art, 1770-1950’ in The Princeton University Library Chronicle 52.1 (1990), pp. 25-77, p. 25.

[3]   Ibid. p. 34.

[4]   For more on the painting see Una Among the Fauns and Wood Nymphs by William Edward Frost.

[5]   Norman K. Farmer Jr. ‘“A Moniment Forever More”’, p. 49.

[6]   Ibid. p. 73.

[7]  Anon. ‘The Royal Academy’ in Saturday Review of Politics 27.710 (Jun 5, 1869), pp. 743-745.

[8] Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf,  Vol. 2 (1920-1924) ed. Anne Olivier Bell, page 113.

Text by Dr Eva-Charlotta Mebius