This sheet comes from a group of metalpoint drawings of women and children in contemporary Victorian dress which are very probably portraits of members and friends of the Prinsep family, with whom G. F. Watts lived for nearly thirty years.

According to Mary Seton Watts, the artist's wife, when he lived in the Prinsep household during the 1850s he 'carried in his pocket a small notebook of indelible paper with a metal point in the sheath, and when his eye fell on any particularly beautiful arrangement in posture or line he would call out, with a gesture of his hand, "Oh, pray, stay where you are for a moment," and the notebook was taken out to receive a monumental outline on the tiny page. These drawings, perhaps the least well-known of his artistic expressions, may be placed, I venture to say, beside his greatest. They are chiefly drawn from Mrs. Prinsep, Lady Dalrymple, Mrs. Jackson and her three daughters Adeline, Julia and Mary, who from their childhood were much at Little Holland House'. (from Mary Seton Watts, The Annals of an Artist's Life, London, 1912, Vol I, p. 157-8)

All objects in this group

Watts often expressed the emotive force of his figures through their pose or drapery rather than by facial expression. This is apparent in the large number of figures depicted from the side or the back in both his paintings and his drawings. This group of drawings in the Royal Academy collection gives some indication of the large number of Watts's figure studies and preparatory drawings which concentrate on the back.

Watts's choice of poses seems to be part of the same impulse as his habit of obscuring the facial features of figures in his allegorical paintings. Both are part of an effort to universalise his subjects rather than focusing on their individual traits. His sometimes unconventional poses also reveal his dislike for relying on generic compositional rules, or what he called 'picture making'.

Further reading:

Veronica Franklin Gould ed., The Vision of G F Watts, exhib. cat., The Watts Gallery, 2004, pp. 72-74

All objects in this group