Study for 'A Story from Boccaccio'

drawing height: 13 cm
drawing width: 16 cm
mount height: 48 cm
mount width: 31 cm

These pen drawings, the smaller of which is approximately the size of a pound coin, are studies for Watts’ thirty-foot-long oil painting, A Story from Boccaccio. The story comes from The Decameron, a book of stories by Giovanni Boccaccio. It tells of the spirits of a knight and woman who are doomed to act out a violent hunt every Friday as punishment for their sins in life. The charging horseman is drawn with rapid, dramatic lines, giving a sense of how he will burst violently out of the forest. The knight wears an ornate helmet with a lion’s face and high crest. Watts also gave the knight a walrus-like moustache, which makes him look more like an animal than a person. In the painting he is cleanshaven, but it may have been Watts’s plan to have an angry, animal-like horseman as a stronger contrast to the nude woman he hunts.

This drawing and another Study for 'A Story from Boccaccio' (COMWG2006.30, 1846) are mounted together. Both studies for Watts’s monumental painting A Story from Boccaccio, painted while he was in residence in Florence in 1846-7, now at Tate Gallery [1]. The subject derives from Boccaccio’s Decameron, a fourteenth-century Italian book of short stories arranged around the premise of a group of rich young people escaping from a plague. Watts’s selection of this narrative probably derived from the four paintings on the same theme by Sandro Botticelli and his workshop, held at Palazzo Pucci in Florence until 1866 (three canvases now at the Museo del Prado, with the fourth panel now restored to the Palazzo Pucci) [2]. The grouping of the figures and their poses may derive from frescoes Watts saw in Rome; the influence of Michelangelo has been suggested but strong similarities may also be seen to Raphael’s frescoes at the Vatican, especially the horse and rider from the Ejection of Heliodorus from the Temple and the kneeling group of women from the Fire in the Borgo [3].

Watts’s time in Italy produced not only monumental paintings and portraits but the opportunity for the young artist to encounter cultured, aristocratic women from Britain and Europe, like Lady Augusta Holland, Marianna Ricci, and Georgiana Duff-Gordon. The prevalence in Watts’s work of this time of sensual female nudes being pursued by clothed or armoured men has been connected to possible romantic entanglements or the hope, however one-sided, thereof, and his self-identification with the knight in shining armour [4]. Watts’s close friendship with Lady Holland in particular raised societal eyebrows but seems to have never been anything more than a platonic relationship between artist and patron. Rather, the eroticism of Watts’s female nudes at this point is more likely connected, as Katerine Gaja has noted, to debates happening in the Florentine art academies around the use of live models for artists rather than antique sculpture [5].

The story Watts chose to illustrate is that of Nastagio degli Onesti, a young nobleman from Ravenna who was in love with a woman who rejected his love [6]. After one too many rejections, Nastagio went alone into the woods where he encountered a naked woman being attacked by dogs and followed by a knight in armour. The knight explained the scene to Nastagio: he had loved the woman Philomena, who did not love him back and enjoyed hurting him. The knight committed suicide, and when Philomena later died, she was sent to hell for her lack of remorse. As punishment for their sins, they were compelled to perform the chase and murder every Friday for the same number of years as the woman had denied the knight. Nastagio, sensing an opportunity, set up a picnic on that spot on a Friday and invited the woman he loved and all her relatives. At the end of the picnic, the two spirits break into the scene and the object of Nastagio’s affection is convinced to marry him. Watts chose the dramatic moment of the knight and his target bursting into the picnic (COMWG2008.44, 1847), allowing him to depict both the nude body of the chased woman and the various reactions of the assembled lords and ladies. The picture was apparently racy enough that Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton (a noted connoisseur and collector of erotica) quipped, ‘You have heard of Watts’s Hymns, now come and see Watts’s Hers!’[7].

Footnotes:

[1] Tate N01913

[2] Katherine Gaja, G.F. Watts in Italy: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Florence: Leo Olschki Editore, 1995) pp. 72-3; Museo del Prado Scenes from the Story of Nastagio degli Onesti, 1483, inv. P02838, P02839, P02840.

[3] Brinsley Ford & John Christian, The Volume of the Walpole Society Vol. 60, THE FORD COLLECTION – II (1998), p. 296 cats RBF454-5. ‘Veronica Franklin Gould, The Vision of G F Watts (Compton: Watts Gallery, 20014) exh cat, p. 8; Wilfrid Blunt suggested ‘the memories of the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican Stanze were now inspiring him to paint on a heroic scale.’ England’s Michelangelo (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975) p. 42.

[4] Katherine Gaja, G.F. Watts in Italy: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Florence: Leo Olschki Editore, 1995) p. 70.

[5] Katherine Gaja, G.F. Watts in Italy: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Florence: Leo Olschki Editore, 1995) p. 70.

[6] The name is given in some nineteenth-century English translations as Anastasio. Giovanni Boccaccio, trans. Charles Balguy, ed. Edward Dubois, The Decameron, or, Ten days Entertainment, of Boccaccio (London: R. Priestly, 1820) pp. 318-22.

[7] Wilfrid Blunt, England’s Michelangelo (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975) p. 42.

Text by Dr Melissa Gustin