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Description: oil on panel

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Dimensions: 45 by 35 cm. ; 8 by 13 3/4 in.

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Provenance: The Fine Art Society, February 1947;
Mr David Loshak and thence by descent

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Published: Katerina Gaja, G.F. Watts in Italy; A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man, 1995, pp. 36-37, Fig. 17

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Notes: 'Like so many contemporary artists, poets and musicians, Watts' imagination was captured by the story of Paulo and Francesca from the fifth canto of Dante's Inferno, where Dante's telling of the story finely balances judgement and compassion. The harshness and irrevocability of the condemnation make him faint with pity and grief; yet the lovers' actual punishment in some ways embodies his sympathy: after all, they are together.' (Katerina Gaja, G.F. Watts in Italy; A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man, 1995, pg. 32)

The chronology of Watts' association with the narrative of Paulo Malatesta and Francesca di Rimini can be traced back to the fertile soil of the Villa Careggi near Rome where Watts' had found his greatest inspiration in the early 1840s. Here he was introduced to John Flaxman's outline illustrations to Dante's Inferno made in 1793 (printed in Florence in 1830) and it was these that inspired his first pen and ink sketch for a Paulo and Francesca made in 1845, a rather erotic translation. At the Villa Careggi Watt's practised fresco painting and his subject for one of the small preparatory experiments, was Paulo and Francesca (the fragment is now at the Victoria and Albert Museum). Like the pen and ink drawing, the fresco depicts the earlier episode in the story in which the adulterous lovers are seen in an adulterous tryst before their murder by Francesca's husband.

The earliest pencil designs and another early pen and ink drawing depict a completely naked Francesca and when the first oil version was begun upon Watts' return to London in 1847 (private collection), the female figure was painted with no drapery concealing her nudity. It was this version which Watts exhibited at the British Institution in 1848, the composition described thus; 'THE two Souls beheld by Dante in his vision of the second circle of the Inferno, where they, remorseful, sorrowful, yet together, are whirled continually onwards, as leaves through the driven air. In piteous words, the Seer hears Francesca's story and swoons, falling as a dead man falls for grief at the unspeakable sadness.' (C. Bernard Stevenson, Catalogue of the Special Loan Collection of Works by the Late G. F. Watts, R.A., O.M. 1905, pg. 33)

The present painting is the second version of the composition in which Watts intensified the melancholy pathos of the subject, the powerful drama of the narrative and the sensual suggestion of the figures. Paulo's muscularity had become more classical in its proportions, his robes more delicately delineated. This appears to reflect Watts' great admiration for the Parthenon fragments at the British Museum, Paulo's powerful torso owing much to his study of the Theseus figure from the pediment marbles. In this version of Paulo and Francesca the lovers appear to be in an eternal sleep, locked forever in one another's arms, never ageing and always caught in the all-consuming passion of intense love. In the two later variants of the same composition of 1870 (Manchester City Art Galleries) and 1872-1874 (Watts Gallery Compton) a deathly pallor appears to creep into the symbolism as love, sex and mortality combine. The 1870 version appears to have lost the grace so evident in the first two versions, whilst in the last version the figures are interpreted with a cold academic classicism. By the mid-1870s the sexual symbolism is almost entirely consumed by the great swathes of drapery in which Paulo and Francesca have become caught up and pathos has been lost in favour of decorative effect. The version here offered is the most successful and closest to Dante's lines 'quei due che 'nsieme vanno e paion si al vento esser leggieri.'

From the start Watt's interpreted the narrative in erotic terms and it has been suggested that the story of Paulo and Francesca held a sexual symbolism for the artist 'since he identified Francesca with the person he was in love with at the time.' (Ibid Gaja, pg. 34). The features of Lady Augusta Holland have been identified in the fresco of Paulo and Francesca whilst the model for Francesca in last oil version is said to be Virginia Pattle, a younger sister of Mrs Thoby Prinsep whom Watts is believed to have been in love (see lot 296a). The model for the present version is the most famous of all Watts' great loves, the actress Ellen Terry to whom he was briefly married (see lots 300 - 302).

As Hugh Macmillan asserted Paulo and Francesca is 'unique among his (Watts) works in this, that it is the only picture which expresses the ideas of another mind; but though it expresses them it renders them in a diffeent way, and is a striking illustration of the fact that it is the individual conception and not the subject itself that makes the picture, for the one may be old, but the other is new. He has put into visible form the very conception of the poet in all its power and tenderness.' (Hugh Macmillan, The Life-Work of George Frederick Watts, R.A., 1903, pp. 167-168)