[2] In the end Watts made little contribution to the Westminster decorations, but from it he conceived his vision of a building covered with murals representing the spiritual and social evolution of humanity.

[3] The prize from the Westminster competition did, however, fund a long visit to Italy from 1843 onwards, where Watts stayed and became friends with the British ambassador Henry Fox, 4th Baron Holland and his wife Augusta at their homes in Casa Feroni and the Villa Careggi in Tuscany.

After obtaining a first-class prize of £500, his winning painting at the exhibition in Westminster Hall was purchased by the government, and was hung in one of the committee rooms of the House of Commons.

It led, moreover, to a commission for the fresco of "St George overcomes the Dragon," which, begun in 1848 and finished in 1853, formed part of the decorations of the Hall of the Poets in the Houses of Parliament.

In 1849 the first two of the allegorical compositions which form the most characteristic of the artist's productions were exhibited—"Life's Illusions," an elaborate presentment of the vanity of human desires, and "The people that sat in darkness," turning eagerly towards the growing dawn.

Notable pictures of the same period are "Sir Galahad" (1862), "Ariadne in Naxos" (1863), "Time and Oblivion" (1864), originally designed for sculpture to be carried out "in divers materials after the manner of Pheidias," and "Thetis" (1866).

[2] One of only two pupils Watts ever accepted was Henry's son Valentine Cameron Prinsep; the other was John Roddam Spencer Stanhope — both remained friends, but neither became a major artist.

He also took a short trip back to Italy in 1853 (including Venice, where Titian became yet more of an inspiration) and with Charles Thomas Newton to excavate Halicarnassus in 1856–57, via Constantinople and the Greek islands.

[citation needed] In 1856 Watts paid a visit to Lord Holland at Paris, where he was then ambassador, and through him made the acquaintance and painted the portraits of Adolphe Thiers, Jérôme Bonaparte and other famous Frenchmen.

Among these paintings is a portrait of his young wife, the actress Ellen Terry, who was 30 years his junior – having been introduced by mutual friend Tom Taylor, they married on 20 February 1864, just seven days short of her 17th birthday.

These works formed part of a revised version of the House of Life, influenced by the ideas of Max Müller, the founder of comparative religion.

Watts hoped to trace the evolving "mythologies of the races [of the world]" in a grand synthesis of spiritual ideas with modern science, especially Darwinian evolution.

To maintain his friendship with the Prinsep family as their children began leaving home, he built The Briary for them near Freshwater, and adopted their relative Blanche Clogstoun.

Refusing the baronetcy twice offered him by Queen Victoria, he was finally elected as an Academician to the Royal Academy in 1867 and accepted to be one of the original members of the new Order of Merit (OM) in 1902 — in his own words, on behalf of all English artists.

The order was announced in the 1902 Coronation Honours list published on 26 June 1902,[8] and he received the insignia from King Edward VII at Buckingham Palace on 8 August 1902.

After completing a commission for the Duke of Westminster for an equestrian monument to commemorate his ancestor, Hugh Lupus, Watts set to work on a new plaster model of another horse and rider, without specific reference to any individual, in 1883.

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".