Olympus on Ida

The British painter G.F. Watts is closely associated with the symbolist movement, a movement across both art and literature that sought to elevate the allegorical above all else. Of his own work, he is known to have said, ‘I paint ideas not things’. For Watts, art was an avenue for exploring fundamental human truths – to come to an understanding of the meaning behind complex ideas such as love and death.

Olympus on Ida comes from Homer’s classical Greek poem The Iliad and relates to the Judgement of Paris, a critical story in Greek mythology. Zeus has nominated Paris (a Trojan mortal) to decide who is the most beautiful of the three goddesses – Aphrodite, Athena or Hera. Each of the goddesses sought to bribe Paris. Aphrodite’s bribe – the love of Helen of Sparta (then married to the King of Greece) – lured Paris to judge her the most beautiful. This, of course, marks the moment in mythology which sparked the beginning of the Trojan War. The three goddesses are depicted as androgynous classical beauties, the soft atmospheric quality of Watts’s painting adding an otherworldly glow to the figures and elevating them beyond the mortal world.

Throughout his lifetime Watts was well recognised and patronised in his homeland, and in the last decades of the nineteenth century he became better known internationally, including in North America, where in 1884 he achieved the distinct honour of being the first living artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Tansy Curtin, Curator, International Art pre-1980