George Frederic Watts OM RA Portrait Study, George Meredith

An original late 19th-century pen & ink drawing, George Frederic Watts OM RA, Portrait Study, George Meredith.

A superb sheet of portrait head studies by the pre-eminent Victorian painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts (1817–1904). The portraits strongly resemble Watts's close friend the poet and novelist George Meredith (1828–1909), whom Watts painted in 1893 (National Portrait Gallery NPG 1543).

Watts became known for his portraiture and his Symbolist allegorical paintings. He was greatly admired by the Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts movements, while in turn artists like Rossetti influenced Watts. He was also influenced by the social theorist Thomas Carlyle, who cited a desire for art to be 'both spiritual and intellectual' and for artists to play a political role.

The Meredith portrait dates from late in the artist's career and the pinnacle of his reputation as Britain’s premier portrait-painter and 'England’s Michelangelo'. In 1886, at the age of sixty-nine, Watts had married Mary Fraser Tytler (1849–1938), the Scottish designer and potter. The pair shared progressive sociopolitical views and were united in their support of women's suffrage. In George Meredith—who was also a vocal supporter of the campaign for suffrage locally and nationally—they found a fellow sympathiser, and together they were part of an emergent early feminist community. In 1909 the Times reported that a letter from Meredith was read at a women’s suffrage 'At Home' meeting, held in Mickleham, and later the same year, he signed, together with a number of prominent men in the political, scientific, literary and artistic spheres, a 'Declaration by men in support of women’s suffrage'.

Watts painted the portraits of other male suffragists, Walter Crane (1891) and John Stuart Mill (1873) and his symbolist art appealed to feminist campaigners: suffragette artist Olive Hockin kept a print of 'Love and Death' in her Kensington studio, and suffragette Lettice Floyd used a print of 'She Shall Be Called Woman' to decorate a WSPU shop in Newcastle.

Provenance: Ex-collection Achille Chariatte (collector's mark verso). Sold Sotheby's, 30 April 1923.

On cream laid paper.