The Genius of Greek Poetry

Watts painted 'The Genius of Greek Poetry' in 1878, a canvas that exemplifies his project of visualising abstract intellectual concepts through ideal human figures — a programme deeply indebted to his reading of Plato and his study of the Elgin Marbles, which he saw as the highest achievement in the fusion of physical beauty and spiritual content. Greek poetry — above all Homer — represented for Watts and his contemporaries the fountainhead of Western civilisation's capacity to transform human experience into enduring form. By personifying this achievement as a single majestic figure, Watts worked in a tradition going back to Renaissance allegory while infusing it with Victorian idealism's belief in the moral power of aesthetic beauty. The Fogg Museum at Harvard holds this canvas, making it one of Watts's relatively few major works to have crossed the Atlantic, where they were less well known than in Britain.

The oil paint on canvas employs the warm, golden atmospheric colour and sculptural figure modelling that Watts developed under the influence of Italian Renaissance fresco and Venetian painting. The figure is set against a broadly painted background that provides spatial context without competing with the allegorical presence. The handling balances idealisation with sufficient painterly texture to avoid the coldness of academic statuary.