The Golden Age

George Frederic Watts painted 'The Golden Age' in 1840, a remarkably early ambitious work for an artist still in his early twenties. The painting draws on the ancient mythological concept of a primordial era of peace, abundance, and natural harmony — a theme with roots in Hesiod and Ovid that retained enormous cultural resonance throughout the Romantic period. For Watts, who would later become Victorian England's foremost allegorical painter, this work represents a formative engagement with the grand tradition of history painting at a moment when British art was grappling with how to sustain that tradition. The National Gallery's canvas documents Watts's early ambitions and his already serious engagement with ideal form and metaphysical subject matter. The Golden Age theme allowed Watts to paint the nude in an elevated, non-erotic context — a strategy he would refine throughout his career as he pursued what he called 'the art of high thinking.'

The 1840 oil on canvas shows a young Watts working toward the monumental figure style he would later perfect, with modelling that already aspires to sculptural weight. The palette draws on classical idealism, using warm flesh tones and soft atmospheric backgrounds to suggest an edenic light. The work's ambition exceeds its execution in places — a quality that makes it historically revealing.