FAMAG 2008.22


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A version of a nineteenth-century British ?Watts? frame with applied composition acanthus leaf top edge, bead-&-spindle ornament, and mitred oak frieze with steps to sight edge, finished with oil gilding. A version of a nineteenth-century British ?Watts? frame with applied composition acanthus leaf top edge, bead-&-spindle ornament, and mitred oak frieze with steps to sight edge, finished with oil gilding.

About this work


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Hemy, Charles Napier RA RWS (1841-1917): Along shore fishermen, signed and dated 1890, oil on canvas, 56 x 76.2 cms. Purchased with funding from the Art Fund and MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund.


More information about the frame

This frame, which is a variation of the ?Watts? frame, was frequently used by both Hemy and Tuke.

The design was named after the artist George Frederick Watts, RA (1817−1904), who employed it almost to the exclusion of other frames both for portraits and subject paintings over a period of fifty years or so. He kept a stock of these in standard sizes in his studio, ready for exhibition, only varying the colour of the gilding and occasionally adding a gessoed, punchwork frieze for particular works.

The ?Watts? frame was the nineteenth-century revival of a sixteenth-century Italian cassetta from the region around Bologna. It was a modest and versatile pattern, fairly easy and economic to produce with its gilded oak frieze. The latter was usually made, for Watts and his peers, with butt-joints, but the versions used by Tuke and Hemy were normally mitred. The designer of the ?Watts? frame cannot be pinpointed; it seems to have been used first in the 1860s by both Watts and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and became so ubiquitous in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that it was the single most commonly-appearing design in the National and National Portrait Galleries.

As in other designs by Ford Madox Brown and Rossetti, the gilding is applied directly to the oak frieze, its distinctive grain visible through the gold in a demonstration of the integrity of materials as preached by John Ruskin − although Ruskin would not have approved of the moulded ornament, where ?compo? masquerades as carved wood.

The engraved borders of the frieze and the stepped moulding to the sight edge (rather than the standard husk or leaf moulding) give a slightly more Arts and Crafts appearance to the frame, whilst helping to enhance the spatial recession of the painted image and focus the viewer?s eye on the scene.