A Fair Saxon

Painting height: 66 cm
Painting width: 53.3 cm

For this historical half-figure composition Watts used his favourite model, Mary Bartley, to pose as a fair Saxon woman. It is said that this was painted in 1868-1870. Others who referenced the Anglo-Saxon world around the same time were less literal. A contemporary novel of the same title A Fair Saxon (1873) by the Irish novelist and politician Justin McCarthy (1830-1912) was set in the nineteenth century and discussed Irish-English political relations.

The novel also featured a love story between a young Irishman and Member of Parliament, the Celt Maurice Tyrone, and a fair Saxon lady, Miss Jennie Aspar [1]. However, Watts’s Saxon woman is dressed in historical dress, and a striking heavy red cape with decorations in yellow ochre draped across her shoulders. Gale R. Owen-Crocker notes:

when the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were deserting paganism for Christianity, women in all regions appear to have abandoned the peplos-type gown and paired brooches in favour of a sleeved robe and a front-fastening cloak which could be pulled over the head [2].

Mary Bartley was favoured by the painter due to her statuesque proportions which are clearly demonstrated here.

In 1880, Watts painted a similar historical half-figure portrait of Mary, but this time the subject was A Roman Lady in the Decadence of the Empire also known as A Roman Lady (COMWG2008.40). The painting was selected for reproduction in the Century Guild of Artists periodical: The Century Guild Hobby Horse. What at first glance may now appear as rather simple historical portraits, appeared to Watts’s contemporaries as monumental achievements. Of A Roman Lady, the editor Herbert Horne (1864-1916) wrote the following lines that one may well apply to the earlier A Fair Saxon too:

Simple, undisturbed by any actual ornament, the felicitous effect of its design is obtained by the fineness of its forms, and the harmony of its masses. In this picture, as it seems to us, Mr. Watts has succeeded, where so many modern painters have failed: he has designed a figure, which is large, yet not coarse; physically developed, yet altogether suave and womanly. And in conveying these qualities to us, he conveys, at the same time, a sense of breadth and decoration, comparable to that, which we admire in the Venetian painters [3].

The later painting also explains the sombre tone of these portraits. A Fair Saxon and A Roman Lady look at us rather disapprovingly. The mere presence of these women serve as a reminder of fallen Empires and lost civilisations. Two years before A Fair Saxon Watts had painted Mary in the guise of the Greco-Egyptian slave Rhodopis (COMWG.114, 1868), who became the wife of the king of Egypt. As A Roman Lady, Mary’s visage seemed to haunt the British Empire of the end of the nineteenth century as a foreshadowing of its coming end.  In A Roman Lady, Watts painted her holding a mirror in her left hand, angled towards the viewer rather than herself, literally holding a mirror up to nineteenth-century society.

Watts was fascinated by the Anglo-Saxon world throughout his life. Between 1843-1853 he was at work on The Saxon Sentinels, painted at Dorchester House (York Art Gallery) [4].

Footnotes:

[1]    See a review of the novel in Anon. ‘A Fair Saxon’ in Saturday Review 35.917 (May 24, 1873), pp. 688-689. See also James H. Murphy Irish Novelists and the Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[2]    Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Dress in Anglo-Saxon England: Revised and Enlarged Edition (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), p. 317.

[3]   Herbert Horne, ‘A Note Upon the Picture of “A Roman Lady in the Decadence of the Empire,” by G. F. Watts, R.A.’ in The century Guild Hobby Horse 5.21 (Jan 1891), pp. 39-40, p. 40.

[4]   Mary Watts, George Frederic Watts Vol. I (London: Macmillan, 1912), p. 131.

Text by Dr Eva-Charlotta Mebius