The great painter Watts, who by the face chiefly sought to express the man, never painted a full-length figure portrait.  His long life, covering nearly the whole of the century, enabled him to portray many of the foremost men of the age—­statesmen, poets, musicians, and men of letters.  In his portrait gallery their fine spirits still meet one another face to face.  But his portraits, in and through likenesses of the men, are made to express the essence of that particular art of which the man was a spokesman.  In his portrait of Tennyson, the bard with his laurel wreath is less Tennyson the man, if one may say so, than Tennyson the poet.  The picture might be called ‘poetry,’ as that of Joachim could be called ‘music,’ for the violinist with his dreamy beautiful face, playing his heart out, looks the soul of music’s self.

Watts was never a Pre-Raphaelite, clothing anew his dreams of medieval beauty; nor a seeker after the glories of Greece and Rome, like Leighton and Alma Tadema; nor a student of the instant’s impression, like Whistler.  To penetrate beneath the seen to the unseen was the aim of his art.  He wrestled to express thoughts in paint that seem inexpressible.  When we go to the Tate Gallery in London, to the room filled with most precious works of Watts, we feel almost overawed by the loftiness of his ideas, though they may seem to strain the last resources of the painter’s art.  One of them is a picture of ‘Chaos’ before the creation of the world.  Half-formed men and women struggle from the earth to force themselves into life, as the half-wrought statues of Michelangelo from the marble that confines them.  Near by is a picture of the ‘All-pervading,’ the spirit of good that penetrates the world, symbolized as a woman gazing long into a globe held upon her knee.  Opposite is the ‘Dweller in the Innermost,’ with deep, unsearchable eyes.  These are pictures that constrain thought rather than charm the eye.  When the thought is less obscure, it is better suited to pictorial utterance, and Watts sometimes painted pictures as simple as these are difficult.

There is nothing obscure in our frontispiece picture of ’Red Ridinghood.’  It sets before us a child’s version and vision of a child’s fable that is imperishable, and as such makes an immediate appeal to the eye.  She is not acting a part or posing as a princess, but is simply a cowering little girl, frightened at the wolf and eager to protect her basket.  In her freshness and simplicity, a cottage maiden with anxious blue eyes, most innocent and childish of children, she need not shun proximity to Richard II., Edward VI., William of Orange, Don Balthazar Carlos, and the Duke of Gloucester.

And thus we conclude our procession of royal children with a child of the people.  Beginning with Richard II., a portrait of a king rather than a child, we end with a picture in which childhood merely, without the gift of distinction or the glamour of royalty, suffices to charm a great painter’s eye and inspire his thought.  With the sweetness and grace of modern childhood filling our eyes, may we not well close this children’s book?