Who's Watts?

Watching Paxo's new series on The Victorians last night (not bad, but surely a real historian/art historian with deeper knowledge and passion might have done better), the image above came up. It's Found Drowned by George Frederick Watts - and, as it happens, it's the great man's birthday today (b 1817). I say Great Man because, in his day - and for a couple of decades after his death - Watts was one of the great figures in British art. Few would have questioned his greatness and his preeminence. Today, however, I imagine that few on the proverbial Clapham omnibus would even have heard of him. His high earnestness and huge synthesising ambition are quite alien to our times - and, it has to be said, his sombre soupy 'spiritual' style of painting is hard to take. A Watts revival any time soon is highly unlikely, I'd say - even though much of his earlier work and his portraiture is still fresh and brilliant and much easier to take.
One thing does make Watts unique, though, and ensures that, however steeply his reputation has declined, his name will live: the Watts Gallery, at Compton near Guildford (a village with a remarkable Norman church). This extraordinary complex includes not only the sole purpose-built gallery in Britain devoted to one artist's works, but also the extraordinary (and to most eyes pretty hideous) Watts Cemetery Chapel. There is certainly nothing like it anywhere else, it's a unique expression of one artist's interests, passions and ambitions, a true descent into a large Victorian mind, and it's well worth a visit - and presumably will be even more so when it reopens next year after much-needed restoration.
Who, I wonder, is the Watts of contempotary British art? The near-universally accepted Great Figure who will, in 100 years' time, be all but forgotten. In these days of hyperinflated reputations, there are surely many contenders - indeed it's a question of Where to begin?...