Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/623

 detached episodes were destined later to come into being, painted as separate pictures and on a different scale from his first conception. London life, the London climate, and the difficulty of even earning a livelihood by the kind of work he longed to do, depressed his never robust health. He planned a travel in Greece with Mr. Ionides in 1848, but gave it up in consequence of the disturbed state of Europe. By this time he had moved to a large studio at 30 Charles Street, Berkeley Square. Here he became a member of the distinguished circle, including Robert Morier, Chichester Fortescue, James Spedding, John Ruskin, Henry Layard, and William Harcourt, which met twice a week for evening conversation at Morier's rooms, 49 New Bond Street, and formed the nucleus of the Cosmopolitan Club. When in September 1853 Morier went abroad, and about the same time Watts gave up the Charles Street studio, the club established itself there, and with one short interruption held its meetings in the same place, with the great Boccaccio picture still hanging on the walls, until 1902, when the house was vacated and the picture removed to the great hall at the Tate Gallery.

A new friend of Watts about 1850–1 was the poet Aubrey de Vere [q. v. Suppl. II], a cousin of his early friends the Spring Rices and brother of Sir Vere de Vere, to whom the painter about this date paid a visit at Curragh Chase. He had always been interested in Ireland, and had previously painted from imagination a picture of an Irish eviction. Flying visits of this nature often proved tonic for his health, which in all these years was very frail. It was about this time that he conceived the scheme of a series of portraits of the distinguished men of his time to be ultimately presented to the nation, and began with Lord John Russell. Additions were made to the series at intervals until almost the year of his death, and the greater part of them have now found their home in the National Portrait Gallery. About the same time he was induced to admit a young gentleman from Yorkshire, Roddam Spencer Stanhope, to work in his studio; but he did not believe in the direct teaching of art to a pupil by a master, only in the exercise of a general stimulus and example. A fresh acquaintance which in 1850 had a decisive influence on his life was that with Miss Virginia Pattle, soon afterwards to become Lady Somers, the most beautiful and fascinating of the seven remarkable daughters of James Pattle, of the East India Company's service. She was then living with her brother-in-law and sister, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Thoby Prinsep [q. v.]. The whole family became his devoted and admiring friends; their features are commemorated in very many paintings and drawings by his hand. The Prinseps were looking for a new home, and Watts found them one in Little Holland House, Kensington, a rather romantic, rambling combination of two old houses in a spacious garden, and with much of a country aspect, in the south-west corner of Holland Park. In this home they invited Watts to join them, and he was domesticated there for the next five-and-twenty years; retaining also for the first year or two the studio in Charles Street. In this circle he first received the name ‘Signor,’ by which his nearer friends always afterwards spoke of and to him, as something less formal than a surname and less familiar than a Christian name. Meantime he was low in health and spirits; and the mood found its expression in pictures such as ‘Found Drowned,’ ‘Under a Dry Arch,’ ‘The Seamstress.’ In 1850 he exhibited a picture of ‘The Good Samaritan.’ Through his friend Lord Elcho he asked for leave to decorate the great hall of Euston Station with monumental paintings, if the company would pay for scaffolding and colours. The offer was declined. He accepted, under protest as to the conditions, an official commission, consequent on his success in the 1847 competition, to paint one of a series of twelve wall-paintings by different hands in a cramped corridor of Westminster Palace, and chose for his subject the ‘Triumph of the Red Cross Knight’ from Spenser. These paintings are now dilapidated and covered up. In 1853 he went for a month's trip to Venice with R. S. Stanhope, and, making his first intimate acquaintance with Venetian art, thought he found in the work of Titian and his contemporaries a pictorial expression of exactly those qualities in flesh and drapery the rendering of which in marble had from the first appealed to him above all things in the sculptures of the Parthenon. His life-long technical preoccupation was the attainment of something like these same Phidiac and Titianic qualities in his own work. In the same year he obtained the best chance of his life for a large decorative work of the kind he loved. For the north wall of the newly finished hall of Lincoln's Inn he offered to paint in fresco a great subject which