Plaster Study of the Full-length Figure of Orpheus for the Oil Painting Orpheus and Eurydice

work height: 44 cm
work width: 30 cm
work depth: 23 cm

Orpheus was a famous musician whose wife Eurydice died from a snakebite. He went to the underworld and made a deal with Hades to bring her back to life. As long as he didn't turn back to look at her before they reached the surface he could have her back. However, he turned around just short of the exit from the underworld and she slipped back down to the afterlife. This is the moment Watts was depicting, as Orpheus tried to hold onto her. Watts often made small sculptural figures in wax, clay, and plaster to use as models for his paintings. These allowed him to work out the pose and composition for the characters in his paintings without using a living model. For this design, two small plaster figures allowed Watts to observe light and shadow across the body. The twisting pose and muscular body shows Watts’s interest in the sculptures and paintings of Michelangelo. Watts had seen Michelangelo’s major works, like the Sistine Chapel and the tomb figures for Julius II, while he lived in Italy in the 1840s. He may also have been drawing on sculpture he saw in Rome, like the famous Belvedere Torso, or Gianlorenzo Bernini's statue of David.

Watts painted multiple (COMWG.79, 1872-1877) versions (COMWG.134, 1900-1903) of the subject of Orpheus and Eurydice and produced several plaster models (COMWG2007.976) to use for his paintings; the Watts Gallery holds two versions of the painting and several drawings. This model is likely a second or later model for the painting, following (COMWG2007.948) which twists more dramatically; this model is closer to the finished paintings.

The subject was drawn from several Roman authors, including Virgil and Ovid [1]. Orpheus, a son of the god Apollo, married Eurydice, a human woman of exceptional beauty. Their marriage was prophesied to not be long, however, and shortly after their wedding Eurydice was bitten by a snake and died. Orpheus couldn’t handle that and entered the underworld to try and get her back, using his semi-divine powers of music learned from his father to make his way into the realm of the dead. There, he made a deal with Hades and Persephone that he would get his wife back if he followed only one simple rule: he could not look back at Eurydice until they both cleared the surface.

However, Orpheus looked back too soon, just before they exited, and Eurydice, still a shade or a ghost, slipped back down into the underworld. Orpheus was distraught and tried to return to Hades for another attempt, but could not as he was still alive and living humans could not enter the underworld twice. In some versions, he played his lyre and bespelled wild animals to tear him to pieces, while in others he was murdered by maenads or bacchantes, frenzied women who followed the god Dionysus, who either threw his head in the sea or kept it as a trophy.

In Watts’s paintings, Orpheus grasps at the pale, ghostly figure of Eurydice as she swoons backwards and downwards towards the land of the dead. Over the subsequent versions of the painting, Eurydice was given less and less coverage until she was fully nude, while Orpheus retained a decorous swathe of drapery. The plaster models in the Watts Gallery collection show the influence of several major works Watts could have seen in Italy and in reproduction, especially the Belvedere Torso of the Vatican Museum, especially in the attention paid to the intercostal muscles in the upper chest, and the torsion of the body seen in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s David, now at the Galleria Borghese [2].

Footnotes:

[1] Ovid, trans. A.S. Klein, The Metamorphoses (2000) 10.1-85; Virgil, trans. J. B. Greenough, Bucolics, Aeneid, and Georgics of Vergil. (Boston: Ginn & Co. 1900) 4.453.

[2] Vatican Museums inv.  1192; Galleria Borghese, inv. LXXVII.

Further Reading:

Mark Bills and Barbara Bryant, G.F. Watts Victorian Visionary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) pp. 192-3.

Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Between Homer and Ovid: metamorphoses of the ‘grand style’ in G.F. Watts,’ Representations of G.F. Watts: Art Making in Victorian Culture, ed. Colin Trodd and Stephanie Brown (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004) pp. 49-64.

Text by Dr Melissa Gustin