Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/621

 whose verdict was not encouraging. The boy got more favourable notice from Haydon, who stopped him one day as he was carrying a bundle of drawings in the street. He drew continually, both copies and originals, and by the time he was sixteen had begun to earn a livelihood by small commissions for portraits in pencil or chalks at five shillings each. At eighteen he entered the Royal Academy schools, where he found the teaching slack and unhelpful. From Hilton, the keeper, he received praise and encouragement, but failed to win the medal which Hilton thought he deserved. In his twentieth year (1837) he had a studio of his own in Clipstone Street, and painted the fine study of a wounded heron, now in the memorial gallery at Limnerslease, from a bird he had bought in a poulterer's shop. At the Royal Academy he exhibited this picture and two portraits of ladies. Portraits of himself and of his father done in these years show already a frank and skilful handling of the oil medium. By this time young Watts had made the acquaintance of Nicolas Wanostrocht [q. v.], an Englishman of Belgian extraction, who kept a successful school inherited from his father at Blackheath, and who was at the same time a professional cricketer and writer on cricket under the name of Nicholas Felix. At the Blackheath school Watts spent many of his evenings, studying music, French, Italian, and to some extent Greek, and acquiring from his new friend both a fresh zest for life and a wider range of reading. As a commission from him Watts drew and lithographed seven positions in the game of cricket, several of the figures being portraits of the famous cricketers of the day. These lithographs are now rare: five of the original drawings are preserved in the Marylebone cricket club. Life was however still a struggle to the young man. The failure of his father's undertakings weighed upon him, and he was subject to alternate moods of confident hope and acute physical and mental depression. In his twenty-first or twenty-second year he had the good fortune to be introduced to Mr. Constantine Ionides, a member of a leading family in the Greek colony in London and father of the well-known art collector of the same name. Mr. Ionides ordered from young Watts a copy of a portrait of his father by Lane, preferred the copy to the original when it was done, and gave him a commission for a family group. The connection was renewed later, and as many as twenty portraits of various members of the Ionides family, dating from almost all periods of his working life, are extant. Distinguished persons from other circles soon began to figure among his sitters, including members of the Noel and of the Spring Rice families. He had a commission to paint a portrait of Roebuck, and one of Jeremy Bentham from the wax effigy which the philosopher had ordered to be constructed over his bones. But in his own mind he from the first regarded portraiture as an inferior branch of art, and set his whole soul's ambition on imaginative and creative design. In April 1842 was issued the official notice inviting cartoons in competition for a design from English history, Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton, in commemoration of the rebuilding of Westminster Palace, just completed. Watts went ardently to work, and sent in, with no expectation of success, a cartoon of Caractacus led in triumph through Rome. To his extreme surprise he won one of the three premiums (300l.), the other winners being Edward Armitage [q. v. Suppl. I] and C. W. Cope [q. V. Suppl. I]. The cartoons were acquired by a speculator and sent on exhibition round the country; that by Watts fell into the hands of a dealer who cut it up; such fragments as have survived are now preserved in the collection of Lord Northbourne at Betteshanger Park. With the sum thus earned Watts determined to start on a journey to Italy. He travelled by diligence, then by water down the Saone and Rhone, and by steamboat from Marseilles to Leghorn, making good friends by the way: and so by Pisa to Florence, where he had promised himself a stay of two months. Absorbed in the enthusiasm of study, he had almost reached the end of his time when he was reminded of an introduction he had brought but neglected to deliver to Lord Holland, then British minister at the court of Tuscany. He called and was welcomed. The rare natural dignity, simplicity, and charm of presence and person which at all times distinguished him won him the warm regard and affection both of Lord and Lady Holland almost from his first visit. They invited him to stay with them for a few days in the house tenanted by the legation, the Casa Feroni (now Palazzo Amerighi) in the Via dei Serragli, Borgo San Frediano. In the result he lived as their guest for the next four years, partly at the Casa Feroni, partly at the old Medicean villa of Careggi without the walls. Studios