G.F. Watts Symbolist Paintings Pt 1 Time Death & Judgement

Time, death, and judgment, which as you can imagine, straight away rules it out of the get well soon card market, and that is a little problem with Watts. A lot of his pictures aren't really commercial. They weren't intended to be. They were really intended to make people think, and also to soften the blow. Now Watts had some very fixed ideas, and despite the best efforts of his friends, he stuck to them. And in symbolist painting, there are various conventions of depicting themes. And in the case of time, it's always old father time. The old man with the long gray beard staggering along with the scythe over his shoulder. And Watts said, no, that's not so. Time isn't an old man. Time doesn't age. We age. All time does is go relentlessly forward, regarding nothing. And he says in his notes to the picture, time, going relentlessly forward, looking to neither right nor left, his piercing blue eye regarding nothing. And as you can see, looking at the face, it is a blind stare. And as a further irritation to the conventionalists, he shows time as a young man in his prime, not an old man just about to go out. As a shock to the conventionalists, he puts in the scythe, but you see how it's grasped firmly in front of him, not draped over his shoulder. And he is walking hand in hand with death. Now, usually death is the grim reaper, the skeleton in the shroud behind you, reaching out with a bony hand to tap you on the shoulder, and in its other hand, an hourglass with the sand just about to run through. And that, it has to be said, is what it was for most of the Victorians. It was always two steps behind. With outbreaks of smallpox and cholera and tuberculosis and all sorts of other things, the grim reaper was never very far away and was truly terrifying. But Watts said, no, it's not really like that. Death is like a sorrowing mother who just gathers her children back to her and says, it's all over, now you can rest. And that probably was a very sweet thought for the people who looked at these pictures. Poor old death, you see, looks exactly like what my grandmother might have called a dying duck in a thunderstorm, dear, because everything she touches dies and it saddens her. You see how she's picked flowers. This is in the days, of course, when you could pick flowers still, unlike today. She's picked flowers, put in her shroud, and they are full-open flowers, half-open flowers, buds, signifying that she picks at random regardless of age, but they're all beginning to wither and it saddens her. And above both these two monumental figures is judgment, justice. Now there are various ways of depicting justice. Favourite way is the statue on top of the Old Bailey, which you see when there's a sensational trial going on and you always get a cut of it on the television news. But to Watts, it was a little different. You see her wonderful flowing red draperies and her flaming sword in her right hand and her scales, but her vision is still obscured so that she shall know not whom she judges. In the case of Watts, it's with her left hand rather than with a blindfold. But she's marching forward in an avenging way, quite frightening really. And round these three great figures is circling what he called the golden disk of the sun and the silver disk of the moon at the side, which isn't awfully plain until you pick it up, the two halves of it, and the green disk of the earth at the bottom. So in a way, it's sort of new age stuff, but typical of Watts, it's a hundred years before anybody else had thought of it. And these pictures were painted really for public places. You can see straight away that it's not a picture for an average domestic house. If you could get it through the door, which is doubtful. If you hung it on the wall, the wall would probably fall down because it weighs about 500 weight. They were intended for public places to be looked at by people in general, and people did look at them. And they sat in front of them and admired them as works of art and as intellectual puzzles. And I don't doubt got a great deal of satisfaction from working out all the internal imagery and then going home to tea feeling very pleased with themselves.