early 1870s
Buys a house at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight
Watts acquires a house at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, where his friends Julia Margaret Cameron and Lord Tennyson already have homes. To keep up his friendship with the Prinsep family as their children begin to leave home, he builds The Briary for them nearby and adopts their relative Blanche Clogstoun.
early 1870s
Commissions a new London home from Cockerell
With the lease on Little Holland House nearing its end and the building soon to be demolished, Watts commissions F. P. Cockerell to build a new London home nearby — New Little Holland House, backing onto Lord Leighton’s estate.
1870s
A revised “House of Life” under Max Müller’s influence
The “House of Life” — a planned epic symbolic cycle in which the emotions and aspirations of life are expressed in one universal symbolic language — receives a revised version in the 1870s. Watts’s association with Rossetti and the Aesthetic movement changes: he combines the Classical tradition with a deliberately agitated, troubled surface, draws on the ideas of Max Müller, the founder of comparative religion, and hopes to trace the evolving mythologies of the world’s peoples, fusing spiritual ideas with modern science, above all Darwinian evolution.

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