Georgina Treherne

Painting height: 50.8 cm
Painting width: 69.9 cm
Frame height: 81 cm
Frame width: 101 cm

An unusual study of a young beauty and friend. After spending most of her childhood in Florence, Georgina Treherne (1837–1914) arrived in London with her family in 1856. Gifted with a fine soprano voice, she had ambitions of a stage career which both her father and husband prohibited. Restricted instead to an amateur profession, she became acquainted with Watts at one of the musical gatherings at Little Holland House in mid-1857. In this unusual double portrait, Watts depicts on a single canvas the singer on two different occasions. On the left-hand side, she is singing softly, and to the right-hand side she is in a state of sleep.

This double portrait of Georgina Treherne belongs to Watts’s experimental ‘double portrait’ series of works. In addition to this canvas, he painted double head portraits of his wife in 1887 (now divided into two separate works) and his long-serving model Mary ‘Long Mary’ Bartley in c.1860. Of the three, this is the most adventurous. Not only is the finish of this portrait completed to a higher degree, but the composition is more complex.

In this painting the two Georgina’s appear to inhabit the same space and interact with one another. On the right-hand side, Georgina has fallen asleep, with her left hand resting on her chest and her head leaning against the back of a plush daybed, in three-quarter profile. On the left-hand side, Georgina is depicted in profile and dressed in a silver coloured evening gown that exposes her shoulders and décolletage, singing a lullaby, almost leaning over her sleeping self. Although her dress is different in the two portraits, her distinctive scarlet crushed velvet hair ribbon, rich deep blue ball earrings and flat gold necklace are visible in both.

According to Mary Watts, in this canvas her husband attempted ‘to capture in colour and line the arresting beauty of face, voice, and its production, all being enchanting’ [1]. In addition to colour, the portrait demonstrates Watts’s interest in sculptural forms. By representing the same head, from various angles and viewpoints, he is able to produce a study of its three dimensionality on a two dimensional surface. His sketchbooks, which are filled with studies of figurative sculptures, reflect this fascination with recording and detailing heads ‘in the round’.

The colours Watts used in this portrait are rich and vibrant. In addition to her jewellery and accessories, the hot pink of her cheeks marks a striking contrast to the more subtle and delicate use of pink in his portraits of other young females, such as Lillie Langtry (COMWG.43, 1880) and May Prinsep (COMWG.88, 1867-1869). It has been suggested that this intense use of colour was adopted to mirror the sitter’s exuberant and excitable character [2].

Biographies of the singer tend to focus on the salacious side, with writers speculating and detailing the events of her tangled love life. Her time at Little Holland House was indeed short-lived as she was ‘expelled’, after ‘carelessly [using] Watts’s studio when it was vacant to meet’ one of her suitors, whilst reportedly betrothed to another [3]. Although she failed to escape scandals in later life, in 1869 she went on establish a philanthropic orphanage scheme from her home in Tavistock House, London and in 1882 she was integral in the passing of the Married Women's Property Act which ‘granted married women the right to pursue civil suits in the courts’ and hold on to their own property and earnings [4].

This double portrait of Georgina Treherne was never exhibited during Watts’s lifetime and it remained within his private collection at Limnerslease. The reasons for this may have been due to the fallout from the inner circle of Little Holland House, but it is more likely that Watts maintained the portrait as a study and a personal memento of the young woman he affectionately referred to as ‘Bambina mia’.

Explore:

Mrs. G.F. Watts [COMWG.7]

Mrs. G.F. Watts [COMWG.1]

Double Portrait of Long Mary [COMWG 180]

Lillie Langtry [COMWG 43]

May Prinsep [COMWG.88]

Footnotes:

[1] Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. II (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1912), p.161.

[2] Marks Bills and Barbara Bryant, G.F. Watts: Victorian Visionary (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with Watts Gallery Compton, 2008), p.134.

[3] Marks Bills and Barbara Bryant, G.F. Watts: Victorian Visionary (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with Watts Gallery Compton, 2008), p.134.

[4] Marks Bills and Barbara Bryant, G.F. Watts: Victorian Visionary (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with Watts Gallery Compton, 2008), p.134.

Further Reading:

Marks Bills and Barbara Bryant, G.F. Watts: Victorian Visionary (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with Watts Gallery Compton, 2008).

Victoria Franklin Gould, G.F. Watts: the last great Victorian (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004).

Edward Grierson, Storm bird: the strange life of Georgina Weldon (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959).

John Martin, ‘Weldon [née Thomas], Georgina’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (23 September 2004).

Judith. R. Walkowitz, City of dreadful delight: narratives of sexual danger in late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. II (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1912).

Text by Dr Stacey Clapperton