Britomart

Watts painted 'Britomart' in 1877, taking his subject from Edmund Spenser's epic poem 'The Faerie Queene', where Britomart is a female knight who embodies the virtue of chastity. Spenser's allegorical epic had been a favourite source for Victorian painters throughout the century, and the figure of Britomart — a woman of exceptional strength, courage, and moral purity who takes on the trappings of male military power — was particularly appealing in an era of growing debate about women's social and intellectual capacities. For Watts, the armoured female knight offered a way to explore his ideals of spiritual courage in specifically gendered terms, departing from the passive or suffering female figures of much Victorian mythological painting. The Birmingham Museums Trust's canvas shows him engaging with the Spenserian tradition of allegorical romance at full creative strength. Britomart's armour simultaneously protects and constrains, a duality that Watts does not resolve but sustains as the painting's moral tension.

The oil on canvas uses warm atmospheric colour to set the armoured figure against a background that evokes romance landscape — vague, atmospheric, lit by a diffused golden light appropriate to the world of allegory. The rendering of armour is handled with enough metallic attention to convince while remaining subordinate to the figure's overall spiritual presence.