George Frederick Watts

pre-raphaelite

George Frederick Watts Paintings 1817 - 1904 Painter, Sculptor, England, Symbolism

The Wife of Plutus, 1877

oil on canvas, 68 x 54 cm, 26 x 21 in.

Board of Trustees of the National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside, Liverpool

Nude Art

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The Wife of Plutus, 1877 by George Frederick Watts is entirely handmade without use of artificial methods. It is painted on linen canvas with oil paints of the highest French quality.

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OIL PAINTING: The Wife of Plutus, 1877
Plutus was the Greek god of wealth, and Watts's allegorical portrait of his wife is a diatribe against the growing materialism of the Victorian age. Bare-breasted, grasping pearls and jewels amidst rich silks, Plutus's wife writhes on her pillow. With her closed eyes and flowing hair it is a pose which immediately suggests the tense contractions of orgasm, but which was actually intended to convey the sickness and lack of fulfilment wealth might bring. It might also be a gesture of grief at Zeus's blinding of her husband so that his gifts should be distributed arbitrarily and not just to those who earned them. Nevertheless, Watts presents a highly eroticised subject, in which the figure's turned head allows the viewer unchallenged, voyeuristic contemplation of her body. Watts exhibited the picture at the New Gallery in 1896-7 accompanied by a misquotation from Ecclesiastes: "And yet the soul is not filled", summarising his belief in the vacuity of accumulated possessions, but, in view of its erotic character, hinting too at the lack of fulfilment which sensory or sexual excess can bring. Compositionally, and in its treatment of the torso, the picture is related to Watts's Study with the Peacock's Feathers. Programmatically, the picture fits into Watts's series of ruminations on wealth in such pictures as Mammon (1884-5), Sic Transit (1880-2) and For he had great Possessions (1894). Watts wrote: "Although I do not wish to preach...The Wife of Plutus, I wish to suggest the disease of wealth like strength or any other possession is a fine thing and may be used for general benefit becoming a noble personal distinction, but if loved only {for] self-gratification is one of most valueless since it forms no part of the possessor's personality" (letter to James Smith, the picture's purchaser, 11 April 1890.