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Artist or Maker: George Frederic Watts, O.M., R.A. (1817-1904)

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Description: Torness Bridge
oil on canvas laid down on board
10 3/8 x 14 1/4 in. (26.3 x 36.3 cm.)

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Provenance: The Fraser Tytler family, Aldourie Castle, Inverness.

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Published: Veronica Franklin Gould, G.F.Watts: The Last Great Victorian, Yale, 2004, p. 333.

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Notes: This is one of two views of Torness that Watts painted during a visit to the Scottish Highlands in the summer of 1899 at the age of eighty-two. He and his wife Mary spent their first night at Aldourie Castle, her family home overlooking Loch Ness, and the picture has remained there to this day. It was Watts's first experience of Scotland and he was enchanted by everything he saw, tramping across the moors and painting vigorously in a makeshift studio. An account of the journey and photographs appear in Veronica Franklin Gould's new study of the artist, pp. 331-333.

As so often with Watts's landscapes, Torness Bridge is both minimal and slightly surreal. By excluding incidental detail and focusing on a single dominant image, he creates a startlingly abstract effect and gives a poetic, symbolist dimension to what might otherwise be a fairly prosaic theme.

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