Mrs G. F. Watts (Backview)

Object height: 50.8 cm
Object width: 25.4 cm

Mrs G. F. Watts (Backview); bust-length female portrait of Watts's second wife Mary Seton Watts (nee Mary Fraser Tytler) painted on their honeymoon.

On 20 November 1886 the sixty-nine-year-old G.F. Watts married thirty-seven-year-old Mary Seton Fraser Tytler (1849–1938), whom he had known since about 1870. She was a Scottish-born artist who had trained at the Slade School of Art and South Kensington School, and later became an active member of the Home Arts and Industries Association. This informal study of her is a companion piece to a more conventional three-quarter-profile portrait. Painted during the couple’s honeymoon in 1887 while they were staying in a hotel in Pera in Constantinople, both were produced on one canvas and Mary catalogued them together in the manuscript catalogue: ‘He began because his hand was wearied by idleness a sketch in oil colour of me. Painted straight off in four colours on a single-prime canvas.’