George Frederic Watts, artist

When I visit an art museum, I'll admit that the highlights are the old German painters (Holbein, Cranach, Durer), the Dutch and Flemish masters (Rembrandt, Hals, etc), and then the impressionists (including Van Gogh). I tend to skip nineteenth century art, as being too sentimental, as being not yet impressionistic. The pre raphaelites, I concur, have a certain charm, but still they cannot fascinate me.
Much to my surprise, the artist that Chesterton chose to write a book about is from the nineteenth century, Victorian, sentimentalist, pre raphaelite-like. On the internet, one can find numerous paintings by Watts. At first glance, I admire some of his portraits, but I have a difficulty with his other paintings. Chesterton, though, makes me want to appreciate this nineteenth-century artist. He starts his discussion of Watts with three points wherein Watts belongs to the nineteenth century; I was particularly struck with the second one:

He [Watts] has the one great certainty which marks off all the great Victorians from those who have come after them: he may not be certain that he is successful, or certain that he is great, or certain that he is good, or certain that he is capable: but he is certain that he is right. It is of course the very element of confidence which has in our day become least common and least possible. We know we are brilliant and distinguished, but we do not know we are right. We swagger in fantastic artistic costumes; we praise ourselves; we fling epigrams right and left; we have the courage to play the egoist and the courage to play the fool, but we have not the courage to preach.

 Chesterton wrote this over a hundred years ago. It makes one think.