Love and Life

Love, represented by the angel, guides the figure of life up towards a more spiritual existence. Watts described how this painting was intended to show ‘frail and feeble human existence aided to ascend from the lower to the higher plane by Love with his wide wings of sympathy, charity, tenderness and human affection’. The painting exists in a number of versions. It was regarded as the companion work to a picture entitled Love and Death. A third composition, Love Triumphant, which shows Love standing above the collapsed figures of Time and Death, completes the message Watts is trying portray.