Watts, GEORGE FREDERICK, painter, was born in London, 23d February 1817, sent a picture to the Academy in 1837, but formed his style during a three years' sojourn in Italy after the old masters, especially of the Venetian school. He attracted public notice by his cartoon of 'Caractacus' sent to Westminster Hall in 1843, and again by pictures of 'Echo' and 'King Alfred' in 1847. He is above all things a poet-painter, but remarkable for his individuality, dignity, extreme correctness in drawing, splendid coloration, and exquisite purity of atmosphere. He has painted many noble portraits (not a few of them the most eminent of his contemporaries) and some fine landscapes; his historical subjects are in the grand dramatic manner, but he is best known by his magnificent pictorial moralities, emblems of profound and subtle import. He sympathised with many of the aims of the Pre-Raphaelite school, but stood quite apart from it. Among his more important paintings—familiar many of them by photogravures or other reproduction, though he has never been a 'popular' painter—are 'Paolo and Francesca' (1848), 'Fata Morgana' (1848), 'Life's Illusions' (1849), 'Love and Death' (1877), 'Watchman, what of the Night?' (1880), 'Hope' (1886). The exhibition of his works at the Grosvenor Gallery (1882), which included one of his admirable sculptures, comprised about half of his life's work. He has executed a fresco of
St George in the Houses of Parliament, and another in Lincoln's Inn. He declined a baronetcy in 1894, when he sent 150 portraits (Carlyle, Browning, M. Arnold, Tennyson, &c.), as a gift to the nation, to the National Portrait Gallery.