Watts arises because he did not look at nature or life directly.
He was overcome by great traditions. He almost persistently looks
at nature through one or two veils. There is a Phidian veil and
a Venetian or rather an Italian veil, and almost everything in life
and nature which could not be expressed in terms of these traditions
he ignored. I might say that no artist of equal genius ever painted
pictures and brought so little fresh observation into his art except,
perhaps, Burne-Jones. Both these artists seem to have a secret and
refined sympathy with Fuseli's famous outburst, "Damn Nature, she
always puts me out!" Even when the sitter came, Watts seems to
have been uneasy unless he could turn him into a Venetian nobleman
or person of the Middle Ages, or could disguise in some way the
fact that Artist and Sitter belonged to the nineteenth century. He
does not seem to be aware that people must breathe even in pictures.
His skies rest solidly on the shoulders of his figures as if they
were cut out to let the figures be inserted. If he were not a man
of genius there would have been an end of him. But he was a man of
genius, and we must try to understand the meaning of his acceptance
of tradition. If we understand it in Watts we will understand a
great deal of contemporary art and literature which is called
derivative, art issuing out of art, and literature out of literature.

The fact is that this kind of art in which Watts and Burne-Jones
were pioneers is an art which has not yet come to its culmination
or to any perfect expression of itself. There is a genuinely
individual impulse in it, and it is not derivative merely, although
almost every phase of it can be related to earlier art. It has
nothing in common with the so-called grand school of painting which
produced worthless imitations of Michael Angelo and Raphael. It
is feeling out for a new world, and it is trying to use the older