Richard Dorment’s favourite painting
The art critic chooses a youthful self-portrait by G. F. Watts
Richard Dorment was The Daily Telegraph’s art critic from 1986 to 2015 and is a trustee of the Watts Gallery. A selection of his reviews, Exhibitionist: Writing about Art for a Daily Newspaper, was published last year
‘For all its dazzling assurance, what I find so touching about this early self-portrait is its suggestion of the 17-year-old artist’s stilldeveloping sense of who he is. When he painted it, Watts was still living in his father’s house in Marylebone and had not yet entered the Royal Academy Schools. With his tousled hair and loosely tied neckerchief, he presents himself as a French romantic painter—a free-spirited inhabitant of the imaginary Bohemia that would be popularised by Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème more than a decade later’