G F Watts Author:Russell Barrington Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II Watts had built his new house in Melbury Road, in one respect, on the same plan as that on which Leighton had built his house in Holland Park Road.... more » To obviate any possibility of staying guests there was only one bedroom, besides those for servants.1 Watts had gone even one step further than Leighton in his endeavours to secure an undisturbed working life. In the new Little Holland House there was but one sitting-room, the rest of the ground floor being occupied by three painting studios and one sculptor's studio. He had been forced to put up an iron house in his garden, in which to store his work and materials during the building of the new house, on account of his having to move out of the old one somewhat suddenly. Shortly before the time we became his neighbours, Watts had had to face life from a fresh point of view. Circumstances had occurred which made him more than ever desirous of consecrating the whole of his life to his work. The aims and ambitions which had from the first guided his art, had strengthened as his gifts ripened. He repeatedly told us that his sole desire was to give his entire life unremittingly and with single-hearted earnestness to his work; to endeavour by so doing to substantiate ideas which he conceived might and ought to be expressed in the language of art; to use his gifts in the cause 1 In several letters, when writing on the subject, he made use of the expression " to avoid complications." MRS. HUGHES From the Painting by G. F. "Watts of raising art to the same level of culture in England as that on which great poetry and great music stand ; in fact, to bring the same high faculties of the human mind and spirit to bear on creations in painting and sculpture that are the sources of the more purely intellectual and abstract exp...« less