Artists Need Women

"A man who makes the creation of works of the highest art his sole and supreme business in life needs before all things a woman to be his servant, his mother, his nurse, his devotee, his housekeeper, and not at all necessarily his bedfellow. . . . As Watts could paint and sculpt in the grand manner as easily as other men can walk or talk, he must be ranked as one of the most fortunate of mortals and yet the most dependent on women."

So wrote George Bernard Shaw, 89, of Artist George Fredric Watts, who would be 137 if alive today. Last week a British biography of Watts arrived in the U.S. (The Laurel and the Thorn, by Ronald Chapman). Along with it came a Shavian review in the London Sunday Observer. The book proved that it took six women to give frail, flowing-haired Painter Watts the feather bed existence his art required. Shaw's review proved that one of the six, auburn-haired actress Ellen Terry, means a lot more to 89-year-old Shaw--even today--than she ever did to Watts.

Armor & Pink Tights. Reviewer Shaw has nothing to say about the other five; to him Actress Ellen Terry is Topic A. The great Playwright conducted a long and passionate correspondence with the great Actress, but rarely met her--by a well understood agreement to keep everything platonic. Now, 17 years after Ellen's death, Shaw takes care to get it on record that there was nothing much between Watts and Ellen. Writes he:

"Mr. Chapman tells the story of Watts' five spiritual wives and an absurd legal union with an incipient genius, the girl model Ellen Terry, when he was a middleaged, lukewarm gentleman and she an actress with a vocation as irresistible as his own. On the only occasion on which Ellen mentioned it to me, she described how, when she was only Watts' model, she came home one day and informed her mother triumphantly that she was going to have a baby.. Watts had kissed her--and she was young enough to believe that babies were the result of kisses. For both of them the marriage was an entirely negligible episode which left no ill feeling."

Ellen was only 16, and Watts 47, when they were married. He admired her youth and spirit, dressed her in armor to pose for The Watchman. The armor was heavy, and as he was putting the finishing touches on the picture, she crashed to the floor in a faint. Watts' middle-aged lady friends, who treated him as a tame prophet and his studio as a shrine, looked askance at bouncy Ellen, and when Watts' child-wife danced in on a dinner party dressed in pink tights, it was decided that she must go. Her later fame came as a faint shock to Watts.

"Spiritual Wives." By that time, Watts' silky beard was greying and he was known as "Signer" to many a famous, whiskered Victorian. Statesman Gladstone and Disraeli, Poets Tennyson and Browning, Novelists Thackeray and George Eliot, Ruskin, and the young pre-Raphaelite Painters Rossetti, Millais and Holman Hunt all came to pose, or admire, or talk shop with the artist, and to take tea in the cozy atmosphere provided by his "spiritual wives" (other men's wives who mothered him). His famed Hope, Fata Morgana, and Una and the Red Cross Knight, were elegant, Raphael-like and beautiful enough to stick in the public's mind. The boy who went to work as a sculptor's apprentice when he was ten was given degrees at Oxford and Cambridge, and grandly declined a baronetcy. His cup was running over when, at 70, Watts really fell in love--this time with a woman of 37.

They were married in 1886. Worshipful, practical Mary Tytler Watts took him to Egypt for their honeymoon, and they went up the Nile in a diohabeah. Mary reverently recorded all the master's offhand words in her diary.

The Utmost. Back in England, they built a country home with a gigantic studio, a gallery open to the public, and a niche where the old Signer could relax on a red silk couch while Mary read to him. In his black scull cap and snowy beard, Watts looked more & more like a Titian portrait. As he grew old, moral philosophy became his chief interest. In the last years of his life he would pause in the garden as he passed the terra cotta sundial given him by his wife, to look at his own motto upon it: "The Utmost for the Highest." "That is the best thing I ever did, to think of that motto," he used to say.

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