These drawings relate to G. F. Watts's fresco 'A Hemicycle of Lawgivers' in the Great Hall of Lincoln's Inn, London. Watts offered to paint the fresco in 1852, writing: 'I venture to make to the Benchers and students of Lincoln's Inn the following proposition, namely, if they will subscribe to defray the expenses of the material, I will give designs and labour, and undertake to paint in fresco any part or the whole of the Hall'. His offer was accepted but work was delayed while Watts travelled abroad for health reasons. When he eventually finished the fresco in October 1859 it was praised by friends and critics. Watts himself had mixed feelings, veering between the conclusion that this had been a wasted opportunity - 'I don't mean to say it is a disgraceful or mean failure, but it is a failure' - to claiming the work as 'perhaps the best thing I have done or am likely to do'. He was also proud to point out the work's status as 'the only true fresco' in the country. To celebrate this gift the Benchers of Lincoln's Inn held a dinner in Watts's honour and presented him with a silver-gilt cup and cover.

The Royal Academy's collection of preparatory drawings for this work consists of individual studies for drapery or details of poses, except for one compositional study for the upper section of the fresco. Mary Seton Watts, the artist's second wife, gave an account of his working methods when tackling the Lincoln's Inn fresco. She wrote that Watts, 'preferring to work without having made any cartoon...made drawings, sometimes on so small a scale that the whole composition went into half a sheet of notepaper; no study seems to have been larger than a medium-sized sheet of drawing-paper could carry, though many of the heads of the legislators were drawn or painted life-size, his friends being laid under contribution in some degree as models for the various types'. (Mary Watts, George Frederic Watts - The Annals of an Artist's Life, London, 1912, Vol I, p.150-1).

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Watts often expressed the emotive force of his figures through their pose or drapery rather than by facial expression. This is apparent in the large number of figures depicted from the side or the back in both his paintings and his drawings. This group of drawings in the Royal Academy collection gives some indication of the large number of Watts's figure studies and preparatory drawings which concentrate on the back.

Watts's choice of poses seems to be part of the same impulse as his habit of obscuring the facial features of figures in his allegorical paintings. Both are part of an effort to universalise his subjects rather than focusing on their individual traits. His sometimes unconventional poses also reveal his dislike for relying on generic compositional rules, or what he called 'picture making'.

Further reading:

Veronica Franklin Gould ed., The Vision of G F Watts, exhib. cat., The Watts Gallery, 2004, pp. 72-74

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