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| Object search: lawrence |
Result 8 of 25 |
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| | James Watt
1815
| Sitter: James Watt
British, 1736 - 1819
| Maker: Henry Raeburn
British, 1756-1823
| 30 x 25 in. (76.2 x 63.5 cm.)
| oil on canvas
| The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
| | James Watt, an engineer and inventor, was born at Greenock, Scotland, on January 19, 1736, a son of Agnes (Muirhead) (1703-55) and James Watt (1698-1782). His father was a successful merchant, craftsman, and builder, and his grandfather had been a teacher of mathematics, surveying, and navigation. In 1753 Watt embarked on a career as a maker of mathematical, or "philosophical," instruments (such as quadrants, compasses, and scales). Although Watt's mechanical inventions and contributions to science were multifarious, it is for his development of a steam engine that he is best known. In 1757 he began a series of experiments in the application of steam at the University of Glasgow. Eighteen months later he moved to Birmingham, England, and commenced a twenty-five-year partnership with the manufacturer and engineer Matthew Boulton (1728-1809), whose financial support enabled Watt to make rapid progress with his ideas for an engine in which heat would be efficiently converted into mechanical energy by preventing steam from dissipating into the air. Watt's engine was essentially complete by 1790, and was rapidly introduced to mills, distilleries, canals, and waterworks. In 1794 he established the firm of Boulton & Watt to manufacture steam engines more competitively. A member of Birmingham's Lunar Society, Watt was interested in alliances of art and science. Earlier in his career he had invented machines for writing in duplicate and for drawing from nature in proper perspective. After retiring from business in 1800, he returned to such art-related inventions, producing, for example, a machine for copying sculpture. The patents on Watt's various engines and other machinery brought him wealth and honors, including the offer of a baronetcy, which he declined. He died at his home, Heathfield Hall, near Birmingham, on August 25, 1819 at the age of eighty-three, and was buried beside Matthew Boulton in St. Mary's Church, Handsworth.
The success of James Watt's steam engine and its enormous contribution to the Industrial Revolution made him a legend in his own time, with a string of official honors attesting to his international stature. Colleagues and friends frequently asked to be honored with his portrait, and other admirers bombarded him with requests for prints to add to their albums of noteworthy individuals. Like many celebrities of the day, Watt kept a stock of engravings at the ready to satisfy such requests, but he did so ruefully, dissatisfied with all of his numerous portraits. In the 1810s, as he passed the three-quarter century mark in declining health, he grew increasingly concerned by the lack of a definitive portrait "to convey some idea of my person & countenance to those who may think me worth remembrance." This was not merely a question of meeting the present demand for prints, but of preserving an image worthy of being handed down to posterity.
Henry Raeburn's portrait of Watt at the age of seventy-nine represents one episode in the aging sitter's urgent quest for a definitive personal image. It was painted on the spur of the moment, while Watt was in Edinburgh on business during the autumn of 1815. For the past three years he had eagerly awaited completion of a portrait by Thomas Lawrence, president of the Royal Academy of Arts. Watt had gone to the top of the profession in anticipation that this would be his last opportunity to be painted. Indeed, Lawrence's request that the portrait be exhibited at Liverpool in 1813 unnerved Watt with fears of potential damage, "considering always that I shall probably never sit again & perhaps may never again visit London." Subsequent criticisms by Watt and the numerous friends and family members who advised him meant that Lawrence was still working on the portrait in September 1815. At the same time, under a barrage of similar criticisms, the engraver Charles Turner (1773-1857) was struggling to produce a print of Lawrence's picture, using experimental copper plates provided by Watt.
Watt was in Edinburgh when he received a proof of Turner's engraving. The friends he showed it to there categorically "condemned it as unworthy of publication." This disappointing result forced Watt to conclude that another portrait would have to be commissioned. "Seeing the matter thus desperate, & having some days to spend at Edinburgh," he later recalled, "I sat to Mr Raeburn." Raeburn had recently painted a former protégé of Watt, the civil engineer and Edinburgh native John Rennie (1761-1821), who may have recommended the painter. The principal assets that would have attracted Watt were Raeburn's lightning speed and acute accuracy. Robert Louis Stevenson would later remark that the painter "looked people shrewdly between the eyes, surprised their manners in their face, and had possessed himself of what was essential in their character before they had been many minutes in his studio. What he was so swift to perceive, he conveyed to the canvas almost in the moment of conception." Raeburn also offered a vigorous but restrained style that would have appealed to Watt's pragmatic sensibilities.
In this portrait, Raeburn adopted the same simple format employed for John Rennie and for the majority of his head-and-shoulder male portraits of this period. Placing the somberly dressed figure against a shadowy backdrop, the artist focused all his attention on the brilliantly illuminated head, which rises out of the darkness with tangible force. Raeburn's bold contrasts of light and shadow dramatize his sitter's features without glamorizing them. On the contrary, his face appears even more gaunt and haggard as a result of the light bouncing off the protruding forehead, nose, and cheekbones, and the deep pockets of shadow collecting in the hollows of his skull. Raeburn's bold, unblended strokes of paint enhance the almost architectonic quality of the facial structure. Watt's cadaverous appearance in this portrait may have been exaggerated by the ill health he suffered while at Edinburgh, but the portrait also intimates the fragile sense of mortality that fueled his last portrait commissions.
Rather daringly, Raeburn allowed Watt's hooded eyes to appear as the darkest area of his face. This treatment gives the man a mysterious, unfathomable character. He confronts us directly, but gives nothing away, so that we hardly know whether his firmly set jaw and unsmiling mouth express sternness, concentration, or melancholy. Perhaps Raeburn had equal difficulty in "reading" Watt during their brief encounter. In any case, his approach contrasts radically with that of Lawrence, who sought to define Watt through an assortment of accessory props--a steam engine diagram, compasses, a snuff box, and so on. Raeburn, by contrast, rejects all such devices (as well as evocative details of gesture, dress, and narrative), in order to offer an intense character study realized solely through his sitter's remarkable face. This tendency in Raeburn's portraiture has been attributed to his deepening interest in the Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69), whose depictions of the human face ravaged by age may have provided a model for the present portrait.
On his return from Edinburgh, Watt informed a friend that Raeburn "has painted a head of me which though it does not come up to my ideas of my own face is more conformable to them than any of the others & by my friends is said to be a good likeness." Though anxious, as always, to have the portrait in hand, Watt reluctantly agreed to allow Raeburn to keep the painting in his studio until January, the artist "having begged some time to show his work." Watt evidently intended to have the painting engraved, for after urging Raeburn several times to send the portrait, he mentioned on February 2, 1816 that it was "wanted for a particular reason, which you shall afterwards be informed of." Watt was understandably leery of saying more without seeing the finished picture, but he clearly entertained high hopes. Responding to an admirer's praise for another of his portraits, he wrote wistfully, "I wish he had had a copy of Raeburns picture in stead of the one he has got."
As it happened, however, Watt and his friends decided against Raeburn's portrait, which they deemed a good likeness, "only it frowns too much." Instead, a marble bust by Francis Legatt Chantrey (1781-1841), for which Watt had been sitting since 1814, was selected as the inventor's definitive image. Watt immediately ordered several plaster casts (which he distributed to friends and colleagues) and he began arrangements for the sculpture to be engraved. It ultimately provided the model for the monument to Watt erected in Westminster Abbey some years after his death in 1819. On analysis, Watt's dissatisfaction with his various portraits seems less a mark of vanity than of a scientist's concern for fact. He seems to have undertaken these portraits almost out of a sense of civic obligation--as the last of his contributions to the British nation. His letters contain reiterated protestations of his aversion to personal publicity, and in response to Chantrey's request to exhibit his bust at the Royal Academy in 1815, Watt confessed, "I am not over fond of exhibiting myself either in person or by proxy." Perhaps the paradox of his self-enforced exposure holds the key to the stubbornly set jaw and protectively shadowed eyes in Raeburn's haunting and cryptic portrait.
|  | | | Accession No. 63.38
| Provenance:
Paid for by the sitter; to his daughter, Margaret; by descent to James Watt Gibson-Watt; to his widow; to her daughter, Geraldine (Gibson Watt) Curling of Doldowlod, Radnorshire; to her son, G. A. Thompson of Bath; with Zeitlin & Ver Brugge, Booksellers, Los Angeles; acquired by The Huntington, 1963
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