‘Is that not Titian?’ Echoes of Venice in George Frederic Watts’s Self-Portraits, between Self-Fashioning and Artistic Practice

Abstract

The reception of Venetian Renaissance painters had a profound effect on the creation of a British tradition of painting and played an important role in the development of the portrait as a typically British genre. This is precisely what this article aims to explore, through the emblematic case of the self-portraits of Victorian artist George Frederic Watts. Many of the artist’s self-portraits, in fact, explicitly engage with the tradition of Venetian art, and do so in multiple ways. On the one hand, the artist models himself on the figure of Titian, playing with the pose, the gesture, and the physical resemblance with the old master. On the other hand, Watts also aims at mastering the secrets of Titian’s painting method, which he discovered through the reading of ancient painting treatises. Thus, the relationship with the Renaissance plays a double role here, as it shapes the public and private image of the artist, but it also affects his artistic practice, and the very materiality of his paintings. This paper will also contextualize Watts’s ‘venetianism’ with that of Frederic Leighton, mid-Victorian photography, and the decadent painter Charles Ricketts, drawing a broader picture of the fascination with Venetian art in late 19th-century England.