G.F. Watts "The Suffering of the Poor" Quartet Pt I

Watts spent four years in Italy as a young man and he had a wonderful time. It's the typical thing of the love affair with Italy that the English have. You come out of the cold north and over the mountains and down into the warm south and it expands your vision on everything, as it did for Watts. And he washed up in Florence in 1843 and he was invited to stay a Friday to Monday with Lord Holland, who was the British minister. And Lady Holland said afterwards he came to stay four days and he stayed four years because they liked him so much. And it transformed his outlook on everything. But like all good things, it came to an end and he came back to London in 1847 and was utterly appalled at what he found. Now anyone who knows anything of 19th century history will know that the 1840s was not a pleasant decade, the hungry 40s. And Watts had known a little of what was going on but hadn't realised the full extent. And he was horrified when he saw the conditions of many people and he felt he had to do something. But he wasn't then at a stage in his life where he was in later years, he was able to write to the Prime Minister of the day and get a personal handwritten reply to his letter. But still he felt he must do something, he must protest. And so he did it in the only way he could, with his art. And painted an amazing quartet of pictures, The Sufferings of the Poor. And personally I always think although the Irish Famine is probably the most famous and the most impressive of the quartet, I think Under a Dry Arch is the most telling image. The poor old woman who was simply starved to death, huddled under an arch, but the sharpest point is made by the fact that she's done it within sight of the charity of the church. Because there you see the Dome of St Paul's silhouetted in the murk. Of the quartet, the most popular has always been Found Drowned, the washed up suicide. It's popular because it's the one occasion where he has pulled the punch a little. What differentiates his series of social realist paintings from most of the others in Victorian painting is that they are life-size and just as nasty. They haven't been prettied up. But here, being a compassionate man, an intensely compassionate man, he couldn't bear to paint her as she would have actually appeared having just washed up out of the Thames. She has been, as it were, hosed off a little in the name of artistic license and decency. Curiously, although it's the only one in the set with softened edges, it is the most intensely political. Because this poor girl has been driven to throw herself into the river to end it all. And you see in her dead hand is clasped what I have always maintained against much art history opinion to the contrary, is a pair of pawn tickets, pawn tokens. She hasn't even a few coppers to redeem whatever pledge it is that she's made. And the title, Found Drowned, comes from the coroner's reports of those days when every night the river was literally trawled for bodies. And if they were pulled out without visible marks of violence upon them, they were recorded by the coroner as found drowned. It was a pretty fair bet that it was suicide, but there was no definite way of proving it. But the political aspect of the picture comes about with the background. It's one of the old Adelphi arches. And we are looking towards the Surrey side of the river, the docks, and you see silhouetted in the muck rising from the river warehouses and cranes. And import-export, you see trade, money being made in huge quantities by the few from the many. And in the centre of the picture, the famous old shop tower, the arms trade, an income of governments since time immemorial. And in the far right-hand corner of the picture, adjacent to the edge of the arch, is the northern pier of Brunel's Great Suspension Bridge, which had just then been put up at Hungerford and was, a few years after this picture was completed, removed and taken to Clifton in Bristol, where it still spans the gorge to this day, which, of course, shows that it never does to underestimate Victorian anything, least of all Victorian engineering. And so that is the equivalent of the white heat of technology, as it were, of its day, a civil engineering masterpiece. And despite all this going on, this poor woman is still obliged to end it all by drowning herself. We have a postcard of it. It's such a popular image. And it sells very well. And it's always puzzled me slightly until one day I suddenly realised that it's a dual-purpose image. You can send it to friends or enemies depending on what you write on it. And I have to say confidentially that I have not a little list of which I'd be happy to send it to saying, wish you were here on the day.