Collections and Learning Assistant Tegan Rush explores the personal style of G F Watts.

“To understand what artists wear, we must first unlock the hold that tailoring has on our psyche, and the role it plays in society.”
- Charlie Porter, What Artists Wear, 2021.

Many an article has been dedicated to the work and life of George Frederic Watts but the artists’s distinct dress is yet to receive such attention. Watts painted self-portraits throughout his life and had his likeness taken by leading artists and photographers of his day such as Frederic Leighton, Charles Couzens and Julia Margaret Cameron. These portraits all contributed to his artistic identity and how he is remembered today, donning a skullcap and academic robe.

This early full-length portrait by Charles Couzens (c. 1849 - 50) is one of few depictions of a clean-shaven Watts. Here he is portrayed as a metropolitan, dapper, young gentleman with influences of Beau Brummel chiming through. His appearance at this time is yet to be influenced by the bohemian aesthetic of his later circle at Little Holland House, first moving there in 1850.

In this photograph by John Watkins taken some 20 years later, we see a more familiar Watts sporting an unruly beard. Writing about Watts’s appearance during this period Mary Watts states that ‘the beard was only touched with grey, his hair quite brown, very fine in quality and brushed back from the forehead.’ In Couzens’ portrayal the young artist looks to the floor whereas in this portrait he gazes up, affirming his status as a prominent figure in the art world of his day.

Watts’s favourite skull cap first appears in his self-portraits in the 1870s and can be seen perched upon his head in the following photograph. Watts also wears bedroom slippers and his Inverness cape, a signature of his wardrobe. The cape was bought on his only visit to Aldourie, Scotland (Mary’s family home) in 1899. The importance of this piece is made clear in one of Mary’s diary entries after his death in 1904. Writing on clearing rooms of the house, Mary describes how she will keep one of his coats, his fur and ‘his dear Inverness’.This emotional attachment to a garment after someone has passed signifies how clothes are both markers of identity and memory.