The Wife of Pygmalion
1817-1904
Signed and inscribed on a label on the stretcher No.3 The Wife of Pygmalion/ G.F. Watts/Little Holland House/Kensington Oil on canvas 26 1/4 ins by 21 ins
Collection Details
Purchased from the artist 1868 by Martha Mary Eustace Smith and her husband Thomas; from whom purchased by private sale by 1st Baron Faringdon, 1887; included in his sale, Sotheby’s, 13 June 1934, lot 136, when it was bought by 2nd Baron Faringdon.
Literature
M S Watts, Watts, 1912, i, pp.236–8; Veronica Franklin Gould, G.F. Watts: The last great Victorian, 2004, pp. 24, 88, 90-1.
Exhibition Details
RA, 1868, No. 323; London, International Exhibition, 1873, No.1026; Grosvenor Galleries, London, 1881, No.55; New Gallery, London, 1896, No.77; RA, Winter, 1905, No.53; Arts Council, Tate, Watts, 1954, No.45; Whitechapel Art Gallery, Watts, 1974, No.23; Manchester City Art Gallery, Minneapolis Institute and Brooklyn Museum, Victorian High Renaissance, 1978, No.17; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 'A Palace of Art in Victorian England: The Grosvenor Gallery', Jan-May 1996; Barber Institute, Birmingham, 'The Blue Bower: Rossetti in the 1860s', 2000-1; Tate Britain, London, 'Exposed: The Victorian Nude', Nov 2001-Jan 2002; Watts Gallery, Compton, Surrey, 'The Vision of GF Watts: The Watts Centenary Exhibition', 2004; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 'Colour Revolution: Victorian art, fashion and design', Sep 2023-Feb 2024.
Background
A label on the back is inscribed: No.3. The Wife of Pygmalion G. F. Watts, Little Holland House, Kensington.
M S Watts relates that Gladstone had expressed a wish to own this picture after seeing it at the Academy in 1868. In a letter to Gladstone, dated 3 May 1868, informing him that it was ‘claimed’, Watts wrote deprecatingly of the painting and invited Gladstone to visit him in order to see the cast of the fragmentary Greek original from which it derived (in the RA exhibition, the work was entitled ‘A Translation from the Greek’).
Watts had discovered the head and torso separately among the Arundel Marbles when visiting the Ashmolean some years before with Sir Charles Newton. The cast that he had made from it always stood in his studio. (For a full account of the picture, see 1978 exhibition catalogue.)
The Trustees of the Faringdon Collection 26.
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