Gf watts biography of martin luther king

Summary of George Frederic Watts

George Frederic Watts was a visionary force with a paintbrush and a powerful persona as a man. Following an extended and inspirational trip to Italy, he took to wearing Renaissance robes on a daily basis. Indeed always unusual, he revealed an early interest in the unconscious mind by preferring to depict his subjects with their eyes closed. In style, he moved organically from Symbolism to abstraction whilst other artists remained far from this point. Overall, Watts was drawn to a cosmic synthesis of all things and as such deals in recurring notions and allegorical renderings of human strength and folly, never to be distracted by the fashions and expectations of the Victorian Age.

Indeed, his art straddles two worlds, that of Victorian romantic and nationalist symbolism, and that of a modernist insistence on digging to the depths and following the individual psyche. To privilege ideas and internal feelings during this era was rare, as was foreseei

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Hope (Watts)

Painting by George Frederic Watts

Hope
Second version of Hope, 1886
Artist	George Frederic Watts
Year	1886 (1886), further versions 1886–1895
Type	Oil
Dimensions	142.2 cm × 111.8 cm (56.0 in × 44.0 in)
Location	Tate Britain

Hope is a Symbolistoil painting by the English painter George Frederic Watts, who completed the first two versions in 1886. Radically different from previous treatments of the subject, it shows a lone blindfolded hona figure sitting on a globe, playing a lyre that has only a single string remaining. The background is almost blank, its only visible feature a single star. Watts intentionally used symbolism not traditionally associated with hope to make the painting's meaning ambiguous. While his use of colour in Hope was greatly admired, at the time of its exhibition many critics disliked the painting. Hope proved popular with the Aesthetic Movement, who co

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Cosmic Visionary

George Frederic Watts’s great, flawed project was to paint the story of humanity, from creation to the immutable qualities of life and of death. This vast series, The House of Life – conceived around 1848 but never completed, seems yet more implausible today: how could one person capture the world’s many voices and truths? What Watts did realise were fragments of this vision – works that distil his understanding of the spirit and the cosmos through an intuitive, economic symbolism. These ‘symbolical’ paintings, as the artist termed them, formed part of a broader development in European art – one that began with romanticism in the late 18th century and was later reinterpreted by symbolism and surrealism.

Rejecting a rigid rationalist worldview – which divided body and soul, dark and light, and flattened the universe into a mechanistic order – these movements embraced the chaos of existence. Symbolism, which flourished from the 1880s to the 1910s, was loose