G F Watts - Court of Death ...

two signed and dated l.r.: G. F. Watts 1891; one signed and dated l.l.: G. F. Watts 1891


red chalk

two 63 by 41.5 cm., 24 ¾ by 16 ¼ in.; one 57.5 by 36 cm., 22 ¾ by 14 ¼ in.; one 70 by 49 cm., 37 ½ by 19 ¼ in.
Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 24,000 GBP

These four drawings appear to have been made by Watts as a set of replicas of some of his most famous and celebrated compositions.

The Court of Death was a composition that Watts worked on intermittently over many years and which exists in various versions, and which originated in 1853 in a painting entitled The Angel of Death intended for a mortuary chapel. Each of the versions of The Court of Death in the Watts Gallery at Compton and that at the Tate have a prominent standing figure at the centre, the dark outline of whose figure shows against a pale coloured drapery.

The original of The Spirit of Christianity was painted in c.1872-5 and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1875. Watts described it as a ‘symbol of compassionate tenderness … [and] an idea that may be accepted by all Christian churches, and even I think, by the hardest philosophy which will admit the divinity of love and charity’. The painting is in a private collection in Australia.

Conscience, The Dweller in the Innermost, of 1885-6, first appeared at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1886 under the title The Soul’s Prism. The painting is now in the Tate Gallery.

Faith, which was painted in the 1890s and which first appeared at the New Gallery in 1896-7, shows an allegorical female figure, in flight from persecution but with sword in hand, ‘listening to the persuasion of Nature hearing the great voice of Eternity’. The work is now in the Tate Gallery.

CSN
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