(1873 - 1960)
George Fiddes Watt, portrait painter, was born in Aberdeen, the son of a carpenter who specialised in the construction of ships. Watts left school at 14 to take up an apprenticeship with a firm of lithographic printers. From the age of 21 he studied life-drawing at the Royal Scottish Academy and later received commissions for portraits, mainly of local dignitaries. He married art teacher Jean Wilcox in 1903 and had three sons and a daughter. In 1910, he took a studio in London and began to exhibit at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. When the bombing of London was particularly heavy in 1940 he moved to Cults, near Aberdeen. He died in Aberdeen at the age of 87.
