Watt, George Fiddes

Person

Watt, George Fiddes

1873-1960

George Fiddes Watt was a portrait painter and engraver. He was born in Aberdeen on 15 February 1873, the only son and the eldest of the five children of George Watt and his wife, Jean Frost. On leaving school at fourteen, he was apprenticed to a firm of lithographic printers in Aberdeen. During these next seven years he also attended evening classes at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen.
At the age of twenty-one Watt went to Edinburgh to study in the life class of the Royal Scottish Academy. For a time he struggled to make ends meet, but through exhibiting his paintings at the academy from 1897 he soon obtained small commissions, particularly for portraits of local dignitaries such as Provost Smith of Peterhead (1901) and Provost Wallace of Tain (1908). When commissions continued to come in steadily, he began renting a large studio at 178 Cromwell Road and exhibiting at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.
In 1903 Watt married Jean Willox, art teacher at Peterhead Academy, and youngest daughter of William Willox of Park, a farmer in the Buchan area of Aberdeenshire. They had three sons and a daughter.
He first began to attract attention with a number of portraits of women, including one of his wife which was his first exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1906. A portrait of his mother painted in 1910 was later bought out of the Chantrey bequest for the Tate Gallery in 1930.
Watt's later reputation, however, rests on his portraits of men. He was interested in strong character, expressed with vigour and freedom of handling. His most vital works probably date from before the First World War and he is seen at his best, for example, in the series of senior legal figures at the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh: Lord Salvesen (1911), Lord Kingsburgh (1912), and Lord Dundas (1916).
Watt's work is regarded as being in the Scottish tradition stemming from Henry Raeburn, with its unaffected simplicity and robust directness of handling. He was much in demand in both Scotland and England for official portraits and painted, among others, Herbert Henry Asquith and Lord Loreburn (both 1912) for Balliol College, Oxford; Cosmo Gordon Lang (1914) for All Souls, Oxford; Arthur James Balfour (1919) for Eton College; Lord Ullswater (1922) for the House of Commons; Sir Joseph Thomson (1923) for Trinity College, Cambridge and Robert Forsyth Scott (1913) for St. John’s College, Cambridge.
After 1930 he ceased exhibiting at the Royal Academy and painted less and less as his eyesight had started to fail. He had been elected an associate (1910) and a full member (1924) of the Royal Scottish Academy and his last exhibit there was in 1941.
In 1940, when the bombing of London became severe, Watt retired to Cults, near Aberdeen. In 1955 the University of Aberdeen awarded him the honorary degree of LLD and late in life he was granted a civil-list pension. His wife died in 1956 and her death was a severe blow to him. In his later years, he became a well-known figure in Aberdeen, with his Vandyke beard, wearing a deer stalking cap, and carrying a long shepherd's crook. Fiddes Watt died at his home in Aberdeen, on 22 November 1960. His work is represented in most Scottish collections, including the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, which has four paintings. A bronze statue of Watt by Thomas Bayliss Huxley-Jones, made in 1942, is in Aberdeen.

D. M. Sutherland (later revised by Robin Gibson), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-36779?rskey=QBN7vd&result=1