GF Watts, Edward Lear and Portraits of Fame and Nonsense
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2 ‘This Is the Sort of Fame for Which I Have Given My Life’: G. F. Watts, Edward Lear and Portraits of Fame and Nonsense Páraic Finnerty George Frederic Watts and Edward Lear each left posterity visual representations of themselves that reveal much about their respective self- fashioning and self- perceived place in Victorian society. Although Watts did not exhibit his self- portraits until the latter part of his career, they record his determination to transcend his lowly background and inhabit the role of great artist. They also chronicle his innovations and experiments in portraiture, which transformed this art form into a biographically revealing medium.1 In the very first of these self- portraits, dated 1834, Watts presents himself as a handsome young man with wavy hair and the attire associated with the Romantic poet or Bohemian, and eyes that suggest sensitivity and resolution. In subse- quent self- portraits, for example the 1846 Self- Portrait in Armour or the 1853 Self- Portrait (The Venetian Senator), Watts poses as the confident artist assured of the dignified and serious nature of his vocation and asserting his place within a European artistic tradition. By the mid- 1860s, Watts had already vindicated the ambition, self- aggrandisement and sense of purpose in these early images; his self- portraits from then onwards reflect his position not merely as one of Britain’s most esteemed painters and sculptors, but as a world- renowned artist. In contrast, in 1831, at the age of 20, Lear drew his first self- portrait and described what he saw: an unattractive, long- necked, big- nosed, ‘half blind’ young man.2 Forty- eight years later, in his poem ‘How Pleasant to know Mr Lear!’, he again mentions some of these physical features, describing his visage as ‘more or less hideous’ and his body as ‘perfectly spherical’, and presents himself as a pleasant, ill- tempered, ‘queer’, ‘crazy old Englishman’ living abroad.3 His correspondence abounds with similar self- caricature in which Lear, typically, depicts himself 53 C. Boyce et al., Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle © Charlotte Boyce, Páraic Finnerty and Anne-Marie Millim 2013 54 Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle as an eccentric, odd- looking, bespectacled man, who is frequently trav- elling somewhere accompanied by a cat or bird, and often carrying his nonsense verse or landscape paintings. These self- deprecating, humorous self- portraits indicate Lear’s awareness of his position as a social outsider who has made marginalisation central to his drôle and often poignant literary and artistic representations. These illustrations and descriptions perfectly capture and reinforce Lear’s situation as the idiosyncratic guest, amusing correspondent and beloved friend of wealthy, aristocratic and influential cultural figures, on whom he continually relied for financial support for his creative pursuits. Consequently, for most of his life, Lear remained on the peripheries of fame and renown, admired as much for his quirky personality as for his talents as a painter, travel writer and illustrator; whereas Watts, known in his lifetime as ‘England’s Michelangelo’, achieved a level of fame, influence and importance in the visual arts comparable to Tennyson’s in literature. Watts received many honours, including one of the earliest Orders of Merit, and became one of the first artists to have retrospec- tive exhibitions in his own lifetime, the earliest of which took place in Grosvenor Gallery in 1881– 82. Such was his celebrity that by the end of his life the increasingly reclusive Watts believed that ‘in these days too much is written of every one who comes at all before the public’, and he envied ‘the oblivion that now hides every fact of the life of the man whose name stands first in literature [meaning Shakespeare].’4 In contrast, the lack of public recognition for his talents disappointed and frustrated Lear, who told Tennyson in June 1855, ‘I feel woundily like a spectator, – all through my life – of what goes on amongst those I know: very little an actor’.5 As was his penchant, Lear transformed his failures into verse, presenting himself in ‘Growling Eclogue’ (1867) as a painter who ‘make[s] large drawings nobody will buy – / [paints] oil pic- tures which will never dry – / [and writes] new books which nobody will read’ (p. 237). It was not until the last decade of his life that Lear finally received literary acclaim for his highly popular nonsense verse; this culminated, in 1886, with John Ruskin placing Lear’s A Book of Nonsense first on his list of his ‘Choice of Books’ in the Pall Mall Gazette.6 If Watts, over the course of his lifetime, became a Victorian celebrity, ‘observed, brushed up against, talked about, and above all recognized’, then Lear, in his, remained a ‘notable’, a man admired and celebrated within a ‘circumscribed sphere’ that included literary and artistic celebrities.7 Expanding on this brief comparison, this chapter explores these men’s interactions with nineteenth- century mechanisms of fame and celeb- rity. It examines their respective responses to the cult of personality G. F. Watts, Edward Lear and Portraits of Fame and Nonsense 55 and culture of publicity, focusing on Watts’s Hall of Fame, comprising portraits of his most distinguished contemporaries, and Lear’s A Book of Nonsense, consisting of verbal and visual ‘portraits’ of unconventional ‘Old Persons’. The chapter, then, compares each man’s relationship with Tennyson and the Freshwater circle, focusing on the way the Isle of Wight became one of the settings for Lear’s passionate friendship with Franklin Lushington, and one of the locations where Watts and the actress Ellen Terry acted out the problems that would eventually end their short- lived marriage. Faces of fame In a letter to Henry Bruce, dated 24 February 1855, Lear writes, ‘Watts is a man of whom I never heard any one who knew him speak otherwise than in terms of real liking. I have only met him twice, & those twice at dinner ... [but] I should really like to meet him at your house some day’; however, Lear also cautions his friend: ‘Watt’s [sic] drawings are of the most beautiful I ever saw. But you should not compare me to him, even in joke’.8 While it is not surprising that Lear and Watts occasionally met, as they moved in similar social circles and had many mutual friends and acquaintances, Lear’s rebuke of Bruce’s presumably well- meant comparison is revealing. The comment indicates that Lear, like his contemporaries, regarded Watts as an important and highly esteemed artist, and that he saw himself as a professional disappointment, despite the admiration he had already received for his ornithological drawings, landscape paint- ings and illustrated travel books; the latter were so impressive that Lear was invited to give drawing lessons, in 1846, to Queen Victoria. One other reason for Lear’s sense of inferiority was that he, unlike Watts, was not a skilled and sought- after portraitist at a time when portraits were in demand among the upper echelons of society, as well as among the middle classes, who commissioned this aristocratically inflected form as a means of reflecting their status, prosperity and self- importance.9 The increased cultural significance and popularity of portraiture was also the result of a wider cultural preoccupation with memorialisation and charismatic personalities, and the pro- liferation of engravings, illustrations and, eventually, photographs of distinguished individuals. As Leo Braudy notes, the foundation of fame and celebrity in this period was to ‘lure allegiance through the eye’ and portraits represented a ‘willingness to face the public in order to be recognized and to be identified’.10 Although Watts often 56 Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle complained about ‘the drudgery of portrait- painting’ and felt it pre- vented him from achieving work ‘worthy of an artist’, throughout his career commercial portraiture offered him a way of making money, which meant he could develop artistically and create other types of artwork.11 As his reputation grew, Watts grew choosy about whom he painted and became more innovative in this field. Rather than flattering his sitters, as many of his contemporaries did, Watts aimed to create works that would ‘be valuable in all times both as faithful records and as works of art’, and, in so doing, he reformed and rejuve- nated what Marion Harry Spielmann called ‘a sadly declining branch of pictorial art’.12 During the 1850s, as Watts popularised the idea of honest and accu- rate portraiture, Lear gave up on what he later called his ‘slavy labours at anatomy’, despite having enrolled in the Royal Academy, in 1850, to be taken seriously as an artist and properly trained, particularly in the representation of the human form.13 This renunciation of portraiture meant that for the rest of his life, in order to make a living, Lear had to petition others persistently to exhibit, commission or buy his landscape paintings, which were out of fashion, and his elaborate oil paintings, which could not compete with those of his contemporaries.14 Lear grew disenchanted by an Academy- orientated art world, which he regarded as ‘narrow’ and ‘rotten’, and became equally frustrated by ‘the wise pub- lic [that] only give commissions for the pictures through the Press that tell the sheep to leap where others leap!’15 His dislike of the spectacle and practice of lionism, which were so prevalent in the social gather- ings and salons of London, meant that he excluded himself from the very places where wider success, fame and fortune were arbitrated and produced.16 Although he maintained a network of influential friends and acquaintances in England, Lear also resigned himself to a marginal social and cultural position and exacerbated this by a life of continuous travel that culminated in his eventual exile in San Remo.