Hereward Trott Watlington was once described as the closest thing Bermuda has ever had to a true Renaissance man. He combined a love of art and architecture with a commitment to public and community service.
A gifted artist in his own right, he left Bermuda a legacy of 18 rare and valuable paintings that would become the catalyst for the founding of the Bermuda National Gallery. The paintings, which range from the 15th to 18th centuries and include works by Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, are part of the Gallery’s European Collection. They are frequently displayed in the Gallery’s Watlington Room that is named after him.
Born in Devonshire, he was the third child of Henry William Watlington and Lucy Trott (later Sir Henry and Lady Watlington), one of Bermuda’s oldest families with roots dating back to 1625. Hereward wrote an extensive history of the family, Family Narrative, which was published in 1982.
Founder of shipping merchants Watlington & Conyers as well as Watlington Waterworks, Henry Watlington was a leading businessman and politician of his day, serving as a Member of Colonial Parliament for Devonshire, a member of the Executive Council (now the Cabinet), and as Mayor of Hamilton.
Like his father, Hereward Watlington served as an MCP for Devonshire (from 1943 to 1968), and spent nine years on the Executive Council as chairman of the Board of Education, during which time he helped establish the Bermuda Technical Institute. He also served as deputy chairman of the board of trustees of King Edward VII Memorial Hospital. His extensive public service earned him a CBE in 1958. He also earned the Knight’s Order of St. Olaf from the King of Norway for 17 years service as Norwegian Consul to Bermuda.
Watlington displayed a natural gift for art from an early age. His earliest known painting, City of Hamilton from across the Harbour, completed when he was 17, clearly shows a nascent talent. He studied art at the Académie Julian in Paris under Paul Albert Laurens (1870–1934) and Jean-Pierre Laurens (1875–1932), and also at the studio of French sculptor and painter André Lhote (1885-1962).
At the request of his father, Watlington returned to Bermuda in the early 1920s to work in the family business after his elder brother was killed during the First World War. During the early part of the Second World War, he served as a liaison officer for the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. He maintained a close interest in the Polish people after the war and set up a Polish immigrant, Andre Bohomolee, at Palmetto House, where he established Bermuda Ceramics from 1949 to 1953.
Following the death of his father in 1942, Watlington took over the family business. He lived all of his life at Woodside, the family home on Middle Road, Devonshire, where he did much of his painting and where his private collection is housed.
Watlington’s work—mainly Impressionist-style oils—featured a wide range of subjects from Bermuda and European landscapes as well as still lifes, florals and portraits of family members. His work was exhibited frequently in Bermuda and earned critical praise at an exhibition in Padua, Italy in 1973.
Watlington, who never married, began seriously collecting art in 1950 when he acquired Mr. Medlycott, by Thomas Gainsborough, for £250. The last known publicly recorded valuation of the painting, in 1980, valued it at £250,000.
It was around this time that he met and befriended Horace Buttery, a fellow painter who was also regarded as Britain’s leading art restorer of the time. Buttery, who restored masterworks by Vermeer, Rubens, Titian, Velázquez, Van Dyck and Holbein in some of Britain’s greatest collections, including the Queen’s, was to become his “eyes” and a trusted adviser on future purchases. In addition to his collection of historic paintings, collected over 30 years, the Bermuda National Gallery also holds the extensive correspondence between the two men that continued until Buttery’s death in 1962.
Watlington’s collection would become the foundation paintings for the National Gallery—something he and other leading artists passionately felt the Island needed. Together with sculptor Desmond Fountain and Michael Darling, he established the Bermuda Fine Arts Trust by an Act of Parliament in 1982. The Trust was set up as the proposed Gallery’s governing body along with a steering committee under artist Charles Zuill to find and establish a permanent home. The Gallery would not become a reality until March 1992, when it opened its doors at the City Hall and Arts Centre in Hamilton.
Sadly, Watlington did not live to see his dream realised. He died in June 1989, at age 86, after suffering a heart attack, while resting on a garden bench at Versailles in France, where he had been vacationing.
His death, however, helped spur on the campaign for a national gallery. In his will, Watlington bequeathed his collection of European paintings to the Bermuda Government, but with the proviso that the paintings be housed in a climate-controlled facility to the standard of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. If the proviso could not be met, the paintings would become the property of the Metropolitan Museum.
A Bermuda Government grant and donations from private and corporate benefactors helped meet the challenge of how to display these important and valuable historic works, which are on permanent loan to the Bermuda National Gallery.
Watlington also had a lifelong interest in architecture and history. He was a founding member and chairman of the Bermuda Historical Monuments Society (which became the Bermuda National Trust in 1970) and founded the Bermuda Historical Quarterly publication.
He restored a number of old Bermuda homes, including Palmetto House on North Shore, Devonshire, which he later persuaded the Bermuda Government to give to the National Trust, Bridge House in St. George’s, which he sold at a nominal price to the Trust, Buckingham in Southampton and Willoughby in Bailey’s Bay. He also supervised the restoration of the original Christ Church in Devonshire, first built in 1624, where he is buried.
He was awarded the Commandatore dell Ordine Al Merito (Order of Merit) by the Italian Government for his restoration of Ca’Parota, a villa he bought in the Eugani Hills in the Veneto region after his retirement in 1967.
He made frequent visits there over the next 20 years to paint, often accompanied by good friend and fellow artist, Captain M. E. Musson. Fittingly, it was Musson’s son John, featured as a child on a tricycle at Willoughby in a 1956 painting of Watlington’s, who curated the first major retrospective of Watlington’s work, Portrait of a Legacy, at the Bermuda National Gallery in 1995.
