been forgotten. The scheme was not accepted at that time, but in 1898 Watts was approached by Henry Gamble, the vicar of St Botolph's Aldersgate church. He suggested the memorial could be created in Postman's Park in the City of London. The memorial was unveiled in an unfinished state in 1900, consisting of a 50-foot (15 m) wooden loggia designed by Ernest George, sheltering a wall with space for 120 ceramic memorial tiles to be designed and made by William De Morgan. At the time of opening, only four of the memorial tiles were in place. Watts died in 1904, and his widow Mary Watts took over the running of the project. Reception Several reverent biographies of Watts were written shortly after his death; and one (by G. K. Chesterton) earlier in the year of his death. With the emergence of Modernism, however, his reputation declined. Virginia Woolf's comic play Freshwater portrays him in a satirical manner, an approach also adopted by Wilfred Blunt, former curator of the Watts Gallery, in his irreverent 1975 biography England's Michelangelo. In his 1988 book on Ruskin, the art critic Peter Fuller emphasised Watts's spiritual and stylistic importance, also noting that late post-symbolist works such as The Sower of the Systems "stretched beyond the brink of abstraction". On the centenary of his death Veronica Franklin Gould published G. F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian, a positive study of his life and work. The composer Charles Villiers Stanford wrote his Sixth Symphony "In Memoriam G. F. Watts". It was composed in 1905 and first performed on 18 January 1906 in London under Stanford's direction. The four movements, although not having a detailed programme, are inspired by several works of art by Watts. Literary references to Watts and his work include Elizabeth Taylor's 1953 novel Angel, where a picture by Watts is donated to a provincial museum by the protagonist, and mention of Watts's painting Progress in Bella Donna by Robert Hichens (1909, p. 34). Watts features (not altogether favourably) as a character in Lynne Truss's comic novel Tennyson's Gift (1996). Gallery References Bibliography This includes a longer list of his portraits and an extended critical summary of his art. Discovering the Sculptures of George Frederick Watts O.M., R.A. (1994) BY Elizabeth Hutchings The Laurel and the Thorn; A Study of G. F. Watts (1945) by Ronald Chapman, Faber and Faber Ltd. External links BBC Restoration