George Frederic Watts was one of the most successful British portrait painters of the nineteenth century. He also won many public commissions and prizes for mural designs, and at different stages of his career received support from various patrons. As a result of this professional security, Watts exercised a high degree of independence when it came to creating his allegorical and narrative paintings, and chose to methodically perfect a limited number of themes – once commenting that he had in mind ‘about twelve to fifteen very large pictures which it will be a great point of conscience to paint, and I can only hope to succeed by giving up the rest of my life to them’. Love’s encounter with Death was one such subject, occupying Watts for nearly forty years. He painted at least twelve versions of this theme, four of them over two metres in height. There are also eight smaller versions, such as that at the National Gallery of Victoria. Watts worked on the subject from the late 1860s onward, and a photograph of the elderly artist shows him seated in his studio before a large version of Love and Death.

The differences between versions are subtle, with the individual works varying mainly in colour, painterly texture, and the rendition of light. Watts only ever slightly modified his composition, to include small additional elements, and he sometimes altered the thickness of the vegetation. All the paintings show Love, personified as the naked boy-god Eros, straining to deny a grey-cloaked Death entry to the realm of the living. Death’s power has already withered the roses around the doorway, however, and the efforts of Love prove fruitless. Love’s act of defiance is therefore purely a heroic gesture. As Watts wrote of this subject to a friend: ‘Love is not restraining Death, for it cannot do so; I wish to suggest the passionate though unavailing struggle to avert the inevitable’.

The emblematic nature of this kind of picture places Watts at the forefront of the Victorian symbolist movement. Alluding to symbolism’s objective of giving visual form to inner states, he often described such paintings as his ‘poetic’ works, declaring them to have a mission to ‘suggest the noblest and tenderest thoughts, inspiring and awakening, if only for a time, the highest sensibilities of our nature’.

As with many of Watts’s symbolist works, the inspiration for his Love and Death pictures was intensely personal. Watts had been moved by the drawn-out death, from consumption, of the Marquess of Lothian, who had sat for a portrait while in the last stages of his life. The first version of Love and Death (Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester) was exhibited at London’s Dudley Gallery in 1870, the year of Lothian’s passing.

Text by Laurie Benson from 19th century painting and sculpture in the international collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2003, p. 84.