Interior of Watts’s Studio, 6 Melbury Rd, Holland Park (August 1904)

drawing height: 55.6 cm
drawing width: 65.7 cm
frame height: 61.5 cm
frame width: 71.5 cm

Interior of Watts’s Studio, 6 Melbury Rd, Holland Park (August 1904): Thomas Matthews Rooke (1842-1942) was a painter, draughtsman and distinguished watercolorist. He was a member of the Royal Watercolour Society and painted architectural subjects, domestic interiors, biblical subjects, imaginative works, portraits and landscapes. He had close associations with Ruskin, Burne-Jones and William Morris, and trained at the RCA and RA. At the age of 29 he was employed as Burne-Jones’s assistant in William Morris’s design company. Seven years later, in 1878, he was appointed Ruskin’s assistant. This watercolour shows Watts’s studio in New Little Holland House, London, shortly after the artist’s death. Note the laurel wreath over the death mask on the table. The picture was commissioned by Mrs Percy Wyndham as a gift for Mary Seton Watts, the artist’s second wife, knowing she would soon leave this house to live permanently in Compton. Several of the paintings, pieces of furniture and anatomical casts in the watercolour are now in the Watts Gallery collection, including Watts’s circular paint table, large easel and library steps, as well as his study of Mary in a straw hat and the large version of Orpheus and Eurydice. This interior of Watts’s London studio is typical of other lavish residences of prominent Victorian artists in 19th-century Kensington. Their ‘Palaces of Art’ were designed by most distinguished architects according to Aesthetic Movement fashion.