In 1899, the 82-year old George Frederic Watts resolved to make, what was to be, his only visit to Scotland. The trip exerted a profound influence on his art, inspiring several beautiful Scottish landscapes, of which the present version of Loch Ness marks the pinnacle of his artistic achievement. The painting combines Watts’s life-long preoccupation with the genre of landscape, with the technical virtuosity and distinctive avant-garde style developed in his final years. Painted just five years before Watts’s death, as an experimental landscape foreshadowing abstraction, Loch Ness counts amongst his most accomplished and significant pictures.

In early July 1899, the painter and his wife arrived in Inverness-shire, where they would remain for four months, until the end of October. Mary Seton Watts recorded the trip in great detail in the posthumous biography of her husband, The Annals of an Artist’s Life (1912). The couple spent the first two days at Aldourie Castle, before moving to the nearby Dalcrombie Lodge, Torness, owned by Mary’s brother. It was their stay at Aldourie with picturesque views of Loch Ness, which gave Watts the idea to paint this iconic lake. Mary’s illuminating account of the circumstances behind her husband’s conception of the Loch Ness composition offers a rare insight into the inspiration behind the subject, and is worth quoting at length: ‘Signor had never crossed the Tweed - I had never any hope he would, when suddenly this wish of his sprang into existence, and . . . we went. We were all praying for brilliant sunshine to greet his eyes when he awoke in the Highlands on the journey north, and that Scotland would greet him radiantly. But she did not. She rolled herself in a white sheet of mist, and, for the first twelve hours, he saw nothing beyond an arm’s length. She reserved her beauty for the next day, when he woke in the home of my childhood on a perfectly radiant morning. By eight o’clock we were standing on the shore of Loch Ness, looking down its full length, on a morning that we called Scotland’s reward for wet days. The first impression of those blue hills and drifting veils of moisture he afterwards painted; and he knew then what I had meant when I had told him of the colour of our Scotch hills... Two days later we drove up to the higher ground where, amid moor and lochs, the little lodge we had taken was ready to receive us. A shelter, brought for the purpose of serving as an outdoor room and studio, was soon set up. It could be easily turned against any wind that blew, and there he almost lived, and, from its open doors, painted many landscapes always with the same conscientious care as ever. On the very first canvas to come upon his easel he painted a rendering of Scotland as he first saw her, shimmering in blue and silver, when he looked down the full length of her longest loch.’ (Mary Seton Watts, The Annals of an Artist’s Life, London, vol. II, 1912, pp. 289-294.)

Mary’s description refers to the preliminary rendition of the subject attempted in the portable studio, which was set up at Dalcrombie, some 8 miles away from Aldourie. It is noteworthy that the Loch Ness composition was created as a ‘record of the painter’s first impression of the Scottish Highlands, where dense mists and rain of the day previous, were drawn away by light and heat’. (ibid) Not entirely satisfied with this preliminary version, on his return to Limnerslease in the autumn of 1899, Watts undertook a second, more successful treatment of the subject, being the present picture. As recorded by Mary Seton Watts it was painted ‘with the old desire still strong to make something better of his subject. Mr Watts preferred this version and retained it when the first was sold to Messrs Agnew and Son.’ (Mary Seton Watts, Manuscript Catalogue of G.F. Watts’s Paintings, Subject Pictures Volume, Watts Gallery Archive, c.1912, p. 87) Although slightly smaller, this subsequent rendition of Loch Ness thus became its main version. The present picture succeeds at evoking both the tranquillity as well as the mystery of Loch Ness. It also conveys the powerful emotive impact of the eternal order of nature, the elements, and of the transient atmospheric effects. In doing so, Loch Ness can be considered as a Symbolist masterpiece.

The present version of Loch Ness, much treasured by Watts, remained in the artist’s personal collects ion until his death in 1904. It had been subsequently passed on to Watts’s widow, and handed down to their adopted daughter, Mrs Lilian Chapman (née Mackintosh), and two generations of her descendants until 1994, when it first surfaced on the market. Having then been acquired by a Japanese collects or, the picture has only now re-appeared for the first t.mes in twenty-four years.

Loch Ness was widely exhibited in Watts’s lifet.mes and posthumously, having been shown in no fewer than nineteen museums and galleries internationally. Crucially, Loch Ness was shown in no fewer than three Watts Memorial exhibitions. Unsurprisingly, at the Royal Scottish Academy Loch Ness took pride of place by opening the whole show. Listed as no. 1 in Room I, the picture’s description in the catalogue highlighted the fact that the locality bore personal relevance to the artist as the childhood home of his Scottish wife. The catalogue also perceptively observed that Watts’s landscapes ‘are typical - rather, perhaps, elemental. Light and colour, sky, earth and sea. . . the great generic facts of nature, not the multitudinous detail of individual forms, are what he sets before us’. The catalogue concluded that ‘concerning himself with form and colour, rather than with mere size [i.e. of mountains], he makes Scotland nearly as impressive as the Alps.’ (Royal Scottish Academy, Memorial Exhibition of the Works of George Frederick Watts R.A, O.M, 1905, pp. 29, 34.)

We are grateful to Julia Dudkiewicz for her assistance in the preparation of this note.