The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (508 page)

 
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(1817–1904).
English painter and sculptor. In 1843 he won a prize in the competition for the decoration of the Houses of Parliament and used the money to visit Italy, where the great
Renaissance
masters helped shape his high-minded attitudes towards art. After returning to England in 1847, he established a solid reputation in intellectual circles, but popular fame did not come until about 1880. Thereafter he was the most revered figure in British art, and in 1902 became one of the original holders of the newly instituted Order of Merit. His style was early influenced by
Etty
, but the
Elgin Marbles
, the great Venetian painters (notably
Titian
), and
Michelangelo
were his avowed exemplars in his desire ‘to affect the mind seriously by nobility of line and colour’. He tried to invest his work with moral purpose and his most characteristic paintings are abstruse allegories that were once enormously popular but now seem vague and ponderous (
Hope
, Tate, London, 1886; and other versions). His portraits of great contemporaries (
Gladstone, Tennyson, J. S. Mill
, etc., NPG, London) have generally worn much better. As a sculptor, he is remembered chiefly for his equestrian piece
Physical Energy
(1904). A cast of it forms the central feature of the Cecil Rhodes Memorial, Cape Town, and another is in Kensington Gardens, London. Watts was twice married, his first wife being the celebrated actress Ellen Terry . She was thirty years his junior and the marriage ended in divorce. His former house at Compton, near Guildford, Surrey, is now the Watts Gallery, devoted to his work. Wilfrid
Blunt
was Curator 1959–85.

 
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(1881–1961)
. Russian-born American painter, sculptor, printmaker, and writer, whose work more than that of any other American artist synthesized the latest European developments at the beginning of the 20th cent. He emigrated to New York with his parents when he was 10. From 1905 to 1908 he travelled in Europe, studying in Paris at the
Académie
Julian and with
Matisse
, admiring early
Cubism
and becoming a friend of Henri
Rousseau
. After his return to New York in 1909 he rapidly became a controversial figure—no other American avant-garde artist of the time exhibited his work more widely or was more harshly attacked. His work was influenced by
Fauvism
and
primitive
art (he was one of the first American artists to show interest in it), but most importantly by Cubism (in sculpture as well as painting). After about 1917, however, Weber's work became more naturalistic. During the 1930s his subjects often expressed his social concern and in the 1940s his work included scenes with rabbis and Jewish scholars—mystical recollections of his Russian childhood. He published several books, including
Cubist Poems
and the autobiographical
Max Weber
(1945).

 
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(1621-before 1663).
Dutch painter. In 1642–6 he was in Italy, and on his return to his native Amsterdam he painted Italianate landscapes close in style to those of
Berchem
, who is said to have been his cousin. Later he turned mainly to pictures of still life with dead game; he also painted portraits. His son,
Jan Weenix
(1642?–1719), specialized in hunting trophy subjects similar to those of his father; indeed, it is often difficult to tell their work apart. Most of his career was spent in Amsterdam, but from 1702 to 1712 he worked at Düsseldorf for the Elector Palatine. Both artists were prolific (Jan told
Houbraken
that his father could paint three half-length life-size portraits in a day) and are represented in many public collections.

 
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(1908– ).
British painter. In the Second World War he served with the Royal Engineers and Army Education Corps and was appointed an
Official War Artist
in 1945, working in Austria, Greece, and Italy. He began teaching at the
Royal College of Art
in 1947 and was Professor of Painting there from 1967 until his retirement in 1973. Weight is something of a maverick figure (‘I don't like the art world very much. I don't like the dealers and I don't like the critics’) and his work is highly individual. His best-known paintings are imaginative figure compositions, set in suburban surroundings. They are superficially realistic, but feature idiosyncratic perspective effects and strange human dramas, producing an effect that is sometimes humorous and sometimes menacing: ‘My art is concerned with such things as anger, love, fear, hate and loneliness, emphasized by the ordinary landscape in which the dramatic scene is set.’ Weight has also painted portraits and landscapes.

 
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