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"Spiritual Wives." By that time, Watts' silky beard was greying and he was known as "Signer" to many a famous, whiskered Victorian. Statesman Gladstone and Disraeli, Poets Tennyson and Browning, Novelists Thackeray and George Eliot, Ruskin, and the young pre-Raphaelite Painters Rossetti, Millais and Holman Hunt all came to pose, or admire, or talk shop with the artist, and to take tea in the cozy atmosphere provided by his "spiritual wives" (other men's wives who mothered him). His famed Hope, Fata Morgana, and Una and the Red Cross Knight, were elegant, Raphael-like and beautiful enough to stick in the public's mind. The boy who went to work as a sculptor's apprentice when he was ten was given degrees at Oxford and Cambridge, and grandly declined a baronetcy. His cup was running over when, at 70, Watts really fell in love—this time with a woman of 37.
They were married in 1886. Worshipful, practical Mary Tytler Watts took him to Egypt for their honeymoon, and they went up the Nile in a diohabeah. Mary reverently recorded all the master's offhand words in her diary.
The Utmost. Back in England, they built a country home with a gigantic studio, a gallery open to the public, and a niche where the old Signer could relax on a red silk couch while Mary read to him. In his black scull cap and snowy beard, Watts looked more & more like a Titian portrait. As he grew old, moral philosophy became his chief interest. In the last years of his life he would pause in the garden as he passed the terra cotta sundial given him by his wife, to look at his own motto upon it: "The Utmost for the Highest." "That is the best thing I ever did, to think of that motto," he used to say.