Two studies for 'Sir Galahad', ca. 1855-56

George Frederic Watts RA (1817 - 1904)

RA Collection: Art

On this sheet are two studies for 'Sir Galahad' (several versions, including Fogg Art Museum, Harvard, 1862, Eton College and Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). Both concentrate on the head and upper body of the knight, who is seen in profile as in the finished painting. These may be early drawings for the composition as Galahad appears to be on horseback rather than standing next to his horse as in the painted versions.

Watts based the features of his Sir Galahad on Arthur Prinsep, youngest son of Sara and Henry Thoby Prinsep in whose house the artist lived for nearly thirty years. The first studies from Arthur for the head of Sir Galahad were made 'as early as 1855 or 56' (see Staley and Watts Gallery 2004). Arthur served as the model for other paintings by Watts, including 'Una and the Red Cross Knight' (Lady Lever Gallery, Liverpool). According to Mary Seton Watts, the artist's wife, after making the first sketches for 'Sir Galahad', the artist had to bribe Arthur not to cut his hair until the painting was finished, so that it retained the 'medieval' style evident in these drawings.

Although Watts based the features of Sir Galahad on Arthur Prinsep, he developed the painting as a generalised contemplation on chivalry rather than as a portrait or an illustration to Tennyson's poem Sir Galahad (1842). The painting was criticised by William Michael Rossetti, a member of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood, who wrote, 'Mr Watts's tendency to idealism interferes, to our judgment, with his success in subjects of this kind, where an ideal of character has to be presented in the form of an individual man. We could ask for more of the individual and less of the impersonal ideal' (see Staley).

Further reading:

Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts - The Annals of an Artist's Life, London, 1912, Vol I, p. 158 and 228

Allen Staley et al, Victorian High Renaissance, exhib. cat., Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1978, cat. no. 12, p.67-8

Veronica Franklin Gould ed., The Vision of G F Watts, exhib. cat., The Watts Gallery, 2004, cat. nos. 74 and 75, p. 76