Poodle Byng soon found her an appropriate milieu in which to shine. This was at Little Holland House, the former dower house of Lady Holland. After her death it had been purchased by Mr and Mrs Thoby Prinsep. Prinsep was an amiable and elderly retired official of the India Office and his wife Sara one of the famously beautiful, famously eccentric Pattle sisters. Georgina was specially delighted to discover there someone she could claim to know from the Florence years. The last time she had seen him was in the Casa Feroni, when she was six. The principal adornment of Little Holland House was her father’s most reviled artist, George Frederick Watts.
Watts was now forty-one years old. He was the centrepiece of all Mrs Prinsep’s bustling social energies, a position he had more or less proposed for himself. ‘He came for three days; he stayed thirty years,’ his patroness observed dryly. The salon he helped her create included many of the Pre-Raphaelites, and figures such as Tennyson and Thackeray, Dickens and Caryle, but it was really given over to Watts’ enigmatic genius. George du Maurier left a description of Sara and her sisters – ‘Elgin marbles with dark eyes’ as Ruskin once called them – handing out tea to their guests with almost eastern obeisance:
Watts, who is a grand fellow, is their painter in ordinary: the best part of the house has been turned into his studio and he lives there and is worshipped till his manliness hath almost departed, I should fancy … After the departure of the visitors we dined; without dress coats – anyhow, and it was jolly enough – Watts in red coat and slippers. After dinner, up in the music room Watts stretched himself at full length on the sofa, which none of the women take when he is there. People formed a circle, and I being in good voice sang to them the whole evening, the cream of Schubert and Gordigiani – c’était très drôle, the worship I got …
This was a different kind of ambiance altogether from Ashridge and du Maurier’s breezy insouciance captures it exactly. The house itself was as good as in the country, removed by trees and meadows from the harsher, more unforgiving light that shone on soirées in Grosvenor Square or Belgravia. It was a low and sprawling building, the interiors decorated by Watts’s frescoes. Some rooms boasted wonderful blue ceilings and others were hung with Indian rugs and cloths. Behind a door covered in red baize lay the hallowed centre of the house, the source of its energies, Watts’s studio. For Georgina it was a perfect stage, non-political, gossipy and faintly loose. There was enough oddity already existing at Little Holland House for her to feel at home. Sara Prinsep swept about the rooms in her own version of Indian dress, coaxing and wheedling Watts and permitting in her other guests what seemed to stricter hostesses a dangerous bohemianism. Her husband’s library was kept out of the way and there were no books on display in the main rooms, forcing visitors and habitués into torrents of conversation and persiflage.
As to Watts, nobody could quite make him out. He had an almost perfect mixture of worldly vanity and ethereal otherness. Tall and thin, very good-looking in youth, now with a hint of pain and suffering peering out from behind biblically long and straggling whiskers, the time he spent in Florence – and in particular the gift for portraiture he discovered there – had set him on the road to fame. If there was a question mark against his sexual appetites – or lack of them – and if men found him ridiculous, he was all the same a society portraitist of the highest rank. This was a label he hated, for Watts had it in mind to paint the large allegorical works with which he had started out, and which the fame of the Florence portraits had eclipsed. As soon as Georgina met him she made up to him unmercifully and was given the reward – the accolade – of a sitting.
Watts had the reputation of making his subjects look younger and more beautiful than they were in life. In his Florence portrait of Augusta, Lady Holland, she looks out directly at the viewer under a slightly tilted head, her huge eyes shaded by the Italian straw hat she wears. Her lips are smiling and there are dimples in her cheeks: she wears the expression of someone sharing a pleasant secret with the artist, and so with us. It is the portrait of a clever, sensuous woman, well aware of the effect she is creating. Watts finished this painting in 1843. Fourteen years on, the portrait of Georgina makes a striking contrast. Shown in three-quarter profile, she wears a similarly wide-brimmed hat and her hand lightly supports her chin and cheek. She has highly arched and plucked eyebrows and looks out a little past the painter with unsmiling eyes. Although she is only twenty, her face is full and the neck plump. Augusta smiles out at the world with sardonic humour; Georgina’s expression is faintly suspicious. It is an unfinished woman that Watts has represented and not an entirely likeable one. He wrote at the time of the portrait:
I must tell you, Bambina mia, that I miss you very much and the studio is very silent. The Bambina’s vivacity was pleasant enough to the dull Signor, who was affected by the exhilarating contagion; now, coming from Lincoln’s Inn weary and listless, I miss the vivacious little Bambina, and though Little H. H. is always charming and I am always made much of and spoiled, especially when I am tired, I miss the effervescent stimulant that was sparkling and overflowing all about the house, yet I was always in a fidget about the wild little girl, and very often not a little unhappy.
There is the accent of a spinster aunt about this. What put him in a fidget and made him unhappy? Was it anything more than having his peace and routine disturbed? Or something deeper? In the next sentence he adds, enigmatically, ‘I depend upon her to be prudent and wise, not less merry I hope, God forbid she ever should be.’
The portrait, of which she was enormously proud, has nothing in it at all merry or skittish. At first blush he might have been writing about someone else altogether. Watts liked very young girls, as he was to prove in a disastrous marriage to the seventeen-year-old Ellen Terry, and he was also fond of moralising. But the artist in him was painfully honest. He had seen a gaucheness in Georgina that he put into words in another, later letter:
I want you to be very wise in the choice of a husband, for everything will depend on the person or persons with whom you may live. If you are fortunate in this respect, you will be as you ought to be, an ornament and a delight to society; if the contrary, I dread more than I can say for the poor little Bambina. I do not think you could be happy as the wife of a poor man …
In one way it is pretty obvious conventional advice. But Watts was writing to the girl who thought of herself as destined for a £10,000-a-year man, a story she must have told him. Fey though he was, however foolish he might act with the young, he was still the piano tuner’s son. His remarks seem to distinguish between a life spent in society and not. That was something he knew all about, but a thing too unpleasant for her to contemplate.
And was there anyone truly rich, eligible and well-connected among the people who flocked to Little Holland House, drank its tea and admired its painter in ordinary? Not Watts himself, nor any of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Of the writers Mrs Prinsep cultivated, all were rich men, but their property was intellectual. Thackeray might gaze in amazement at a cheque for £2000 from his American tour and Dickens was by no means a poor man, yet theirs was a different kind of wealth. Carlyle had once explained this in a letter to Jane Welsh, the intelligent and ambitious girl he was trying to persuade to marry him – and it was a sentiment likely to have found favour at Little Holland House:
Kings and Potentates are a gaudy folk that flaunt about with plumes & ribbons to decorate them, and catch the coarse admiration of the many headed monster for a brief season – and then sink into forgetfulness … but the Miltons, the de Staëls – these are the very salt of the earth; they derive their ‘patents of Nobility’ direct from Almighty God; and live in the bosoms of all true