England’s Michelangelo in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: The G. F. Watts Exhibition, 1884–1885

Abstract

In 1884–1885, George Frederic Watts, Britain’s most famous painter, became the first living artist to stage a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The show attracted one million visitors and by the end of 1885, Watts was internationally recognised as ‘the greatest painter since the old masters’. Yet the process of organising the exhibition forced Watts to confront both the cultural and the physical distance separating Britain from America. Watts’s letters to the Metropolitan Museum as well as to the exhibition’s young curator, Mary Gertrude Mead reveal the merits, responsibilities and trials of transatlantic celebrity in the nineteenth century. This essay, the first in-depth discussion of Watts’s Metropolitan Museum exhibition, addresses how the Victorian era’s most prominent artist managed his reputation, envisioned his relationship to America and, through the legacy of his art, attempted to secure lasting fame.