Abstract
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 subsequent 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
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Notes
Information in this chapter about Watts’s life derives from the following biographical sources: M. S. Watts, George Frederic Watts: the Annals of an Artist’s Life, 3 vols (London: Macmillan and Co., 1912);
Wilfrid Blunt, ‘England’s Michelangelo’: a Biography of George Frederic Watts (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975);
Caroline Dakers, The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999);
Veronica Franklin Gould, G. F. Watts: the Last Great Victorian (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004); G. F. Watts: Victorian Visionary, ed. by Mark Bills and Barbara Bryant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
See Vivian Noakes, Edward Lear: the Life of a Wanderer, rev. edn (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2004), p. 20. Information in this chapter about Lear’s life derives from the following biographical sources: Noakes, Edward Lear;
Angus Davidson, Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet (London: John Murray, 1938);
Peter Levi, Edward Lear (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995);
Susan Chitty, That Singular Person Called Lear (Stroud: Tempus, 2007).
Edward Lear, The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse, ed. by Vivian Noakes (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 428–29. All subsequent references to this text are taken from this edition and given as page numbers in parentheses in the essay.
Nicholas Dames, ‘Brushes with Fame: Thackeray and the Work of Celebrity’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 56 (2001), 23–51 (pp. 33, 28).
See Paul Barlow, ‘Facing the Past and Present: the National Portrait Gallery and the Search for “Authentic” Portraiture’, in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. by Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 219–38;
Louise Lippincott, ‘Expanding on Portraiture: the Market, the Public, and the Hierarchy of Genres in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. by Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 75–88.
Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Vintage, 1997), p. 399.
Cited in Barbara Bryant, G F Watts Portraits: Fame and Beauty in Victorian Society (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2004), pp. 19, 23.
See also Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 79.
See Richard Salmon, ‘The Physiognomy of the Lion: Encountering Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century’, in Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850, ed. by Tom Mole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 60–78.
Sidney Colvin, Memories and Notes of Persons and Places, 1852–1912 (London: Edward Arnold, 1921), pp. 94, 95.
See Richard Ormond, G. F. Watts, The Hall of Fame: Portraits of his Famous Contemporaries (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1975);
Leonée and Richard Ormond, G. F. Watts: the Hall of Fame, Portraits of his Famous Contemporaries (Compton: Watts Gallery, 2012).
Watts’s ideas are explicated throughout his writings: see, for example, G. F. Watts, ‘The Present Conditions of Art’, in Watts, Annals, III, 147–90. See John Price, ‘“Heroism in Everyday Life”: the Watts Memorial for Heroic Self Sacrifice’, History Workshop Journal, 63 (2007), 254–78.
See Ormond, G. F. Watts, p. 8; Barlow, pp. 224–38; Lara Perry, ‘Nationalizing Watts: the Hall of Fame and the National Portrait Gallery’, in Representations of G. F. Watts: Art Making in Victorian Culture, ed. by Colin Trodd and Stephanie Brown (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 121–33 (pp. 121, 127).
Juliette Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: a Study of Nineteenth-Century ‘Hidden’ Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 54, 48.
Peter Hamilton and Roger Hargreaves, The Beautiful and the Damned: the Creation of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Photography (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2001), p. 5;
Helen Groth, Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 36. See also Barlow, pp. 221–22.
Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: a Life for our Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 270;
William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, and the English Comic Writers (London: George Bell & Sons, 1876), p. 190.
For a discussion of the marginalisation of poetry, see Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 19–48.
See also Joss Marsh, ‘The Rise of Celebrity Culture’, in Charles Dickens in Context, ed. by Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 98–108;
Jeffrey Richards, Sir Henry Irving (Hambledon: Continuum, 2005), pp. 259–81.
See Claire Brock, The Feminization of Fame, 1750–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. by Ann R. Hawkins and Maura Ives (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
See Julie F. Codell, ‘Victorian Artists’ Family Biographies: Domestic Authority, the Marketplace and the Artist’s Body’, in Biographical Passages: Essays on Victorian and Modernist Biography, ed. by Jo Law and Linda K. Hughes (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), pp. 65–108.
See Jim Cheshire, ‘Introduction’, in Tennyson Transformed: Alfred Lord Tennyson and Visual Culture, ed. by Jim Cheshire (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2009), pp. 8–19 (p. 11).
Sidney Colvin, ‘English Painters and Paintings in 1867’, Fortnightly Review, 2 (1867), 464–75 (p. 475), in ProQuest British Periodicals <http://www.pro-quest.co.uk> [accessed 12 April 2013].
M. H. Spielmann, ‘The Works of Mr George F. Watts, R. A. with a complete catalogue of his Pictures’, Pall Mall Gazette, 22 (1886), 1–32 (p. 13), in Gale 19th Century British Library Newspapers <http://gale.cengage.co.uk> [accessed 12 April 2013].
See Richard Salmon, ‘Signs of Intimacy: the Literary Celebrity in the “Age of Interviewing”’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 25 (1997), 159–77.
See William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2 vols (New York and London: Macmillan, 1905–06), II (1906), 123;
William Cosmo Monkhouse, British Contemporary Artists (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1899), p. 27.
G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Literary Portraits of G. F. Watts, R. A.’, The Bookman, 19 (1900), 80–83 (p. 81), in ProQuest British Periodicals <http://www.proquest.co.uk> [accessed 12 April 2013].
W. K. West, G. F. Watts (London: George Newnes, 1904), p. xxvii.
See James Eli Adams, ‘The Hero as Spectacle: Carlyle and the Persistence of Dandyism’, in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. by Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan (Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 213–32 (p. 215).
See also Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, ed. by Archibald MacMechan (London: Ginn, 1901), pp. 132, 164.
Arthur Symons, ‘The Art of Watts’, Fortnightly Review, 74 (1900), 188–97 (p. 189), in ProQuest British Periodicals <http://www.proquest.co.uk> [accessed 12 April 2013].
See Alexis Easley, Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), pp. 49–52.
See Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’, in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1985), pp. 240–57.
See Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography: From the Earliest Use of the Camera Obscura in the Eleventh Century up to 1914 (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 227.
Annals, I, 113. For a discussion of the ideals of the National Portrait Gallery in relation to celebrity culture, see Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 171–74.
Cited in ‘A National Gallery’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 45 (1856), 367–71 (p. 369), in ProQuest British Periodicals <http://www.proquest.co.uk> [accessed 12 April 2013]. In 1853, Carlyle suggested the need for a ‘home of all the national Divinities [...] where unconsciously but very veritably, the better parts of the souls of all men might worship’ (cited in Charles Saumarez Smith, The National Portrait Gallery (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1997), p. 12).
The portrait, like its photographic equivalent, is a ‘memento mori’; see Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), p. 15.
See also Carol Christ, ‘Painting the Dead: Portraiture and Necrophilia in Victorian Art and Poetry’, in Death and Representation, ed. by Sarah Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 133–51.
For one of the best overviews of Lear’s nonsense verse, see Ina Rae Hark, Edward Lear (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982).
See also Jackie Wullschläger, Inventing Wonderland: the Lives and Fantasies of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, and A. A. Milne (London: Methuen, 1995);
Ann Colley, ‘Edward Lear’s Limericks and the Reversals of Nonsense’, Victorian Poetry, 26 (1988), 285–99;
Clifton Snider, ‘Victorian Trickster: a Jungian Consideration of Edward Lear’s Nonsense Verse’, Psychological Perspectives, 24 (1991), 90–110;
Kirby Olson, ‘Edward Lear: Deleuzian Landscape Painter’, Victorian Poetry, 31 (1993), 347–62;
Ann C. Colley, ‘Edward Lear’s Anti-Colonial Bestiary’, Victorian Poetry, 30 (1992), 109–20.
[Edward Strachey], ‘Nonsense as a Fine Art’, Quarterly Review, 167 (1888), 335–65 (p. 335), in ProQuest British Periodicals <http://www.proquest.co.uk> [accessed 8 April 2013]. For an indication of how Lear’s work has been interpreted by other contemporary critics, see Ann C. Colley, Edward Lear and the Critics (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), pp. 1–45; ‘Mr. Lear’s New Nonsense’, The Spectator, 23 December 1871, pp. 1570–71;
Sidney Colvin, ‘Review of More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, &c.’, The Academy, 3 (1872), 23–24, in ProQuest British Periodicals <http://www.proquest.co.uk> [accessed 12 April 2013]; ‘Lear’s Nonsense Books’, The Spectator, 17 September 1887, pp. 1251–52.
See Michael de Nie, The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798–1882 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004);
Martha Banta, Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841–1936 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), pp. 19–124.
Erin O’ Connor, Raw Materials: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 151–52.
Lillian Craton, The Victorian Freak Show: the Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in 19th-Century Fiction (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2009), p. 35.
Marlene Tromp, with Karyn Valerius, ‘Toward Situating the Victorian Freak’, in Victorian Freaks: the Social Context of Freakery in Britain, ed. by Marlene Tromp (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008), pp. 1–18 (p. 8).
See Anna Barton, ‘Delirious Bulldogs and Nasty Crockery: Tennyson as Nonsense Poet’, Victorian Poetry, 47 (2009), 313–30;
Richard Cronin, ‘Edward Lear and Tennyson’s Nonsense’, in Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays, ed. by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 259–75;
Richard Maxwell, ‘Palms and Temples: Edward Lear’s Topographies’, Victorian Poetry, 48 (2010), 73–94.
Ruth Pitman, Edward Lear’s Tennyson (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988), p. 28.
Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: a Memoir by His Son, 2 vols (London: Macmillan & Co., 1897), I, 381. See Leonée Ormond, ‘Tennyson and the Artists’, in Tennyson Transformed, ed. by Cheshire, pp. 42–61 (p. 45).
‘Mr Lear’s Drawings’, The Saturday Review, 31 May 1890, p. 684, in ProQuest British Periodicals <http://www.proquest.co.uk> [accessed 12 April 2013]. See also ‘Fine-Art Gossip’, Athenaeum, 2 November 1889, p. 604, in ProQuest British Periodicals <http://www.proquest.co.uk> [accessed 12 April 2013]; ‘Edward Lear’, Athenaeum, 2 December 1911, p. 687, in ProQuest British Periodicals <http://www.proquest.co.uk> [accessed 12 April 2013]. See also Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (London: Macmillan & Co., 1949), p. 501.
Anne Thackeray Ritchie, ‘Reminiscences’, in Alfred, Lord Tennyson and His Friends: a Series of 25 Portraits and Frontispiece in Photogravure from the Negatives of Mrs. Julia Margaret Cameron and H. H. H. Cameron, ed. by H. H. H. Cameron and Anne Thackeray Ritchie (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1893), pp. 9–16 (p. 9).
Letters of Emily Lady Tennyson, p. 137; cited in Ann Thwaite, Emily Tennyson: the Poet’s Wife (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 342.
The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, ed. by John Guille Millais, 2 vols (London: Methuen & Co., 1899), II, 142; Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, p. 441; Edith Nicholl Ellison, A Child’s Recollections of Tennyson (London: J. Dent, 1907), p. 9.
Letters of Anne Thackeray Ritchie, ed. by Hester Ritchie (London: John Murray, 1924), p. 127. See also Hester Thackeray Fuller, Three Freshwater Friends: Tennyson, Watts and Mrs. Cameron (Newport: Isle of Wight County Press, 1933), p. 24.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ed. by J. M. Gray (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 176–77.
G. K. Chesterton, G. F. Watts (London: Duckworth, 1904), p. 40.
Chichester Fortescue, And Mr. Fortescue: a Selection from the Diaries from 1851 to 1862 of Chichester Fortescue, Lord Carlingford, K. P. P. (London: J. Murray, 1958), p. 86.
For a discussion, see Sarah Rose Cole, ‘The Recovery of Friendship: Male Love and Developmental Narrative in Tennyson’s In Memoriam’, Victorian Poetry, 50 (2010), 43–66.
Nina Auerbach, Ellen Terry: Player in Her Time (London and Melbourne: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1987), p. 77.
Cited in Veronica Franklin Gould, ‘G. F. Watts and Ellen Terry’, in Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence, ed. by Katherine Cockin (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), pp. 33–47 (p. 39).
Gail Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performances and the Galatea Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 33.
Catherine Robson, Men in Wonderland: the Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 222.
G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant (London: E. Brimley Johnson, 1902), pp. 44, 48–49.
Wim Tigges, An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), pp. 47.
See also Tigges, 47–50, 126–32; William Baker, ‘T. S. Eliot on Edward Lear: An Unnoted Attribution’, English Studies, 64 (1983), 564–66;
Hana F. Khasawneh, ‘The Dynamics of Nonsense Literature: 1840–1940’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Sussex, 2009).
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© 2013 Charlotte Boyce, Páraic Finnerty and Anne-Marie Millim
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Finnerty, P. (2013). ‘This Is the Sort of Fame for Which I Have Given My Life’: G. F. Watts, Edward Lear and Portraits of Fame and Nonsense. In: Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007940_3
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