G F Watts (1817 – 1904) had a career spanning over 70 years, and he inspired many household names including Rossetti, Tennyson, Leighton, Picasso, Lucian Freud and Barack Obama. Celebrating 200 years since his birth, England’s Michelangelo explores Watts as a painter, social activist and philanthropist.
Explore the major themes of Watts’s art: colour, cosmos and celebrity. View the artist’s most striking masterpieces, borrowed from public and private collections and showcased in his own historic picture gallery.
See one of the nation’s favourite portraits, Choosing (1864, National Portrait Gallery), displayed alongside powerful protest paintings and abstract canvases, such as The Sower of the Systems (1902, Art Gallery of Ontario), which is returning to the UK for the first time in over a century.
At the heart of the show are Watts’s most ambitious allegorical and Symbolist works, including the iconic Hope(1886, private collection) and Love and Life (1880s, private collection), which formerly hung in the White House.
