The Ionides family portrait by GF Watts, 1840s. Courtesy Watts Gallery.
Staff at Watts Gallery near Guildford will reveal an important acquisition on December 6 2005, when a Victorian family portrait takes its official position.
The painting, ‘Alexander Constantine Ionides and his wife Euterpe, with their children Constantine Alexander, Aglaia, Luke and Alecco’, is by the artist GF Watts OM RA (1817 – 1904), to whom the gallery is devoted.
It was bought in June 2005 at the Sotheby’s Victorian and Edwardian Art Sale for £232,000, with generous help from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the National Art Collections Fund (Art Fund) and Forbes Inc, supported by Christopher Wood.
“This dazzling work fills two gaps in our collection,” said Richard Jeffries, Watts Gallery Curator, “by virtue of its period and being a family group. It also illustrates why Watts, from the beginning of his career was so highly regarded and sought after as a portrait painter.”
GF Watts was a celebrated painter and sculptor. Courtesy Watts Gallery.
David Barrie, Director of the Art Fund, and a representative from the HLF will unveil the portrait before Friends of the Watts Gallery on December 6, 2005.
“Ionides was an exceptionally generous and far-sighted patron of the arts – one of the most important in Victorian England,” he commented. “This painting helped to launch Watt’s career and strengthened his relationship with Ionides, which was long-lasting and very close.”
Indeed, Watts had close ties to the Ionides family over a period of 70 years, during which time he advised on their collection and helped them become a most prolific patron. He managed to paint five generations of the family, represented in the early 1840s in the Watts Gallery’s new portrait.
“The Watts Gallery absolutely had to have it,” David Barrie continued, “and we were really glad to be able to make the purchase possible.”
Courtesy Watts Gallery.
Watt’s later portrait style is well known from the 'Watts Hall of Fame' – a series of Victorian portraits gifted to the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) and displayed at Bodelwyddan Castle. NPG Curator and expert Barbara Bryant described the Ionides group as “by far the most important of Watt’s early portraits. Its impressive scale and fluent composition reveal the high ambitions of the young artist, then aged about 24.”
Watts Gallery houses the studio collection of George Frederic Watts, who was not only a celebrated artist, but a central figure in the bohemian circles of the day. He was married to actress Ellen Terry when she was just 17 and was a friend of Lord Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites. The gallery was built just before his death in 1904 as the first gallery purpose-built to house the work of a single artist (though today it contains some work by contemporaries).
“The Heritage Lottery Fund is delighted to support the acquisition of this fascinating portrait of the Ionides family,” said Tessa Hilder, HLF manager for the South East. “It will make a significant addition to the Watts Gallery’s collection, giving visitors an insight into the life of a prosperous 19th-century family. The painting will be enjoyed by many as well as providing the gallery with an invaluable educational resource.”
