Abstract
When Burne-Jones and Rossetti came to lunch at the Priory on 9 January 1870, they surprised George Eliot by carrying into the drawing room a bust of Clytie, the gift of its sculptor, George Frederic Watts. Though she had often admired his paintings and may even have seen the original marble Clytie exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1868, she had never met Watts. Suffering all his life from vague ill health, he did not go about like his friends Millais and Leighton, whom the Leweses sometimes saw at dinner parties. Yet his enthusiasm for George Eliot’s work is clear from a letter he wrote to Charles Rickards in 1866:
In the belief that art of noble aim is necessary to a great nation, I am sometimes tempted in my impatience to try if I cannot get subscriptions to carry out a project I have long had, to erect a statue to unknown worth — in the words of the author of Felix Holt, ‘a monument to the faithful who are not famous’. I think this would be a worthy thing to do, and if I had not unfortunately neglected opportunities of making money, I would certainly do it at my own expense. I am at this time making a monumental statue, and feel confident I could execute a colossal bronze statue that should be a real monument. I would give up all other work to be enabled to carry out such an idea, and should be contented if guaranteed against loss; contented to be able to meet the expenses of the undertaking.1
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Notes
Mary S. Watts, George Frederic Watts: Annals of an Artist’s Life, 3 vols (London, 1912) vol. i, p. 224. The quotation is from Felix Holt, ch. 16.
Mrs Russell Barrington, Reminiscences of George Frederic Watts (London, 1905) pp. 41–2. The original marble Clytie is in the Guildhall Gallery, London. Two others, carved by an assistant, are in the Queens Park Gallery, Manchester, and the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston. A bronze cast from the Tate Gallery is on permanent loan at Leighton House.
See Penelope Fitzgerald, Edward Burne-Jones: A Biography (London, 1975) pp. 117–31.
The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1954–78) vol. v, p. 77.
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© 1992 Mary N. Haight
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Haight, G.S. (1992). George Eliot and Watts’s Clytie. In: Witemeyer, H. (eds) George Eliot’s Originals and Contemporaries. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12650-7_13
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