"A man who makes the creation of works of the highest art his sole and supreme business in life needs before all things a woman to be his servant, his mother, his nurse, his devotee, his housekeeper, and not at all necessarily his bedfellow. . . . As Watts could paint and sculpt in the grand manner as easily as other men can walk or talk, he must be ranked as one of the most fortunate of mortals and yet the most dependent on women."
So wrote George Bernard Shaw, 89, of Artist George Fredric Watts, who would be 137 if alive today. Last week a British biography of Watts arrived in the U.S. (The Laurel and the Thorn, by Ronald Chapman). Along with it came a Shavian review in the London Sunday Observer. The book proved that it took six women to give frail, flowing-haired Painter Watts the feather bed existence his art required. Shaw's review proved that one of the six, auburn-haired actress Ellen Terry, means a lot more to 89-year-old Shaw—even today—than she ever did to Watts.
Armor & Pink Tights. Reviewer Shaw has nothing to say about the other five; to him Actress Ellen Terry is Topic A. The great Playwright conducted a long and passionate correspondence with the great Actress, but rarely met her—by a well understood agreement to keep everything platonic. Now, 17 years after Ellen's death, Shaw takes care to get it on record that there was nothing much between Watts and Ellen. Writes he:
"Mr. Chapman tells the story of Watts' five spiritual wives and an absurd legal union with an incipient genius, the girl model Ellen Terry, when he was a middleaged, lukewarm gentleman and she an actress with a vocation as irresistible as his own. On the only occasion on which Ellen mentioned it to me, she described how, when she was only Watts' model, she came home one day and informed her mother triumphantly that she was going to have a baby.. Watts had kissed her—and she was young enough to believe that babies were the result of kisses. For both of them the marriage was an entirely negligible episode which left no ill feeling."
Ellen was only 16, and Watts 47, when they were married. He admired her youth and spirit, dressed her in armor to pose for The Watchman. The armor was heavy, and as he was putting the finishing touches on the picture, she crashed to the floor in a faint. Watts' middle-aged lady friends, who treated him as a tame prophet and his studio as a shrine, looked askance at bouncy Ellen, and when Watts' child-wife danced in on a dinner party dressed in pink tights, it was decided that she must go. Her later fame came as a faint shock to Watts.