Mammon

Painting height: 53.3 cm
Painting width: 30.5 cm
Frame height: 86 cm
Frame width: 64 cm

Mammon: Dedicated to his Worshippers was Watts’s grim criticism of what he saw as the modern addiction to money and material possessions, writing in 1880 that ‘material prosperity has become our real god’. Mammon had roots in the bible, becoming associated as a Christian demon in the medieval period. Inspired by the grand manner portraiture of the Old Masters, Watts portrayed Mammon as a grotesque king, wearing lavish but badly fitting gold clothes and holding bags of money. In his lap he cruelly holds a nude woman under his massive fist while he crushes a collapsed man under his foot. Despite visiting the topic of Mammon often in his writings, this early oil study is one of only two images of Mammon produced by Watts, the other being the finished version now in the Tate Collection.

The modern vice of materialism and greed was one which preoccupied Watts, with Mammon becoming the key manifestation of this. In the gospels of Matthew and Luke it was pronounced: ‘Ye cannot serve God and Mammon’. Mammon was derived from the Aramaic word for wealth and riches. By the medieval period he came to be associated with the demon of covetousness. In literature, Mammon was adapted as an allegorical figure in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen, where he is a grotesque king who dwells in a cave surrounded by gold and the bones of his worshippers, and in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, described as ‘downward bent’, more concerned only with money [1].

While drawing from established concepts, the visual iconography of Mammon was invented by Watts, drawing together literary themes and visual allegories. Mammon himself is a large and fearsome king, sitting atop a throne which is crowned with skulls. His robes, though lavish and gold, are baggy and ill fitting, suggestive of his misguided desire for grandeur. His foot, wrapped in a bright white bandage suggests gout, a symbol of his wealthy indulgence. This early oil sketch is a more exaggerated negative depiction of Mammon than the finished composition, his face more bloated and the white bandage (changed to red in the final version) more starkly contrasted to the reds and golds of the final composition. The visual imagery of Mammon drew on social attitudes towards overindulgence and weight, his maladies as symbolic of his monstrous appetite for luxury [2].

On his head, Mammon wears a gold crown which sport the ears of a donkey, an allusion to what the Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) described as ‘Midas-eared Mammonism’, a reference to the mythological King Midas, who was awarded the ears of an ass by the god Apollo in Ovid’s Metamorphosis [3]. Watts’s visual reference to King Midas, who could turn anything to gold with his touch, was a further emphasis to Watts’s belief in the corrupting power of wealth. Illustrative of his cruelty, Mammon crushes under his fit a nude woman whose head rests on his knee, while a nude man is similarly crushed under the weight of his foot behind his throne. Their naked bodies cruelly lifeless, act as symbols of youth and innocence which Mammon has destroyed.

Watts firmly opposed what he saw as the evils of modern consumer society, writing in 1880 that ‘Material prosperity has become our real god, but we are surprised to find that the worship of this visible deity does not make us happy’ [4]. Mary Seton Watts (1849-1938) records how Watts would ‘often peach against Mammon worship, and the hypocritical veiling of the daily sacrifice made to this deity’. She goes further noting that he envisioned a statue to Mammon in Hyde Park, a grim spectacle in which ‘he hoped would be at least honest enough to bow the knee publicly to him’ [5]. In 1909 Evelyn de Morgan (1855-1919) developed this theme further, painting the Worship of Mammon. Influenced by Watts conception of the deity, de Morgan’s focus is instead on the female supplicant of Mammon, perhaps in response to Watts’s subtitle of ‘To His Worshippers’.

In the wake of the rapidly moving modern Industrial Revolution in the second half of the nineteenth century, many continental symbolist artists and writers began to scrutinise the economic, political and scientific transformations of life, a development which they saw as negative. For many, like Watts, these pessimistic visions of modern materialism were bringing about the corruption of humanity [6].

Mammon’s visual imagery was rooted in the Grand Manner portraiture of the old masters, which Watts manipulated and twisted. In particular, his lavish red throne, richly draped background and regal pose recalls the papal portraits of Raphael, Titian and Velazquez. Watts had painted the portrait of the English cardinal Henry Edward Manning (1808-1892), adapting similarly the high-backed chair, this time crowned with skulls.

Despite Watts frequent writings on Mammon and preoccupation with the subject, he produced only two paintings on this theme, this oil sketch in the Watts Collection and a larger finished version given to the Tate Collection. It was not widely exhibited during Watts lifetime, however it was included as one of the nine artworks exhibited at the 1889 Exposition Universalle in Paris where its strong moral symbolist message would have been seen by other Symbolist artists. The composition continued to have an afterlife in prints and caricature. In 1904 the American business magnate J. D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) was parodied as Mammon, ‘the greatest money tyrant the world has ever known’ [7].

Footnotes:

[1] Mark Bills & Barbara Bryant, G. F. Watts: Victorian Visionary (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2008), p.230.

[2] Roy Porter & G. S. Rousseau, Gout: the Patrician Malady (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000).

[3] Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Chapman & Hall, 1872) p. 34.

[4] G. F. Watts, ‘Present Conditions of Art’, Nineteenth Century, 1880, p. 17.

[5] Mary Seton Watts, The Annals of an Artists Life, Vol. II, (London: Macmillan and Co., 1912), p. 149.

[6] Michelle Facos, Symbolist Art in Context (University of California Press, 2009), p. 66.

[7] Daily Express, 10 September 1904.

Further Reading:

Elise Lawton Smith, Evelyn Pickering De Morgan and the Allegorical Body (London: Associated University Press, 2002).

Text by Dr Nicole Cochrane