Paint it black: Frank Holl, master of Victorian darkness

When the last major exhibition of the work of Frank Holl was held, his paintings were shown beside those of JMW Turner and both were described as "deceased masters of the British School".

As it turned out, that exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1889, the year after the artist worked himself to death at the age of 43, was almost the last the world heard of Holl – until this week, when Watts Gallery in Surrey attempts to drag him back into the light.

The collapse of Holl's reputation was swift and spectacular. Soon after his death in July 1888 of heart failure, a memorial fund was set up with the intention of buying a major work for the national collection and building an imposing monument in St Paul's Cathedral. The appeal was abandoned after just six months when only £600 had been collected – though it did pay for a modest memorial at St Paul's, with a fine portrait bust by Alfred Gilbert.

In his day, Holl's portraits of sombre Victorian worthies were regarded as works of genius: his celebrity subjects included WS Gilbert, famous for his partnership with the composer Arthur Sullivan on the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and the ageing former prime minister William Ewart Gladstone, who admitted to being exhausted by the sittings but wrote, "I delight to render all the aid I can to a great painter".

Holl's paintings and engravings of the poor, including hungry children and weeping widows in spartan cottage interiors, look sentimental to modern eyes, but were at the time regarded as masterpieces of social realism.

The owner of one painting – of a family in mourning black gathered around a table, which was so admired in 1868 that the 24-year-old artist was awarded a scholarship to Italy for it – refused to give it up even when Queen Victoria wanted to buy it from him. The queen then gave Holl a commission, and he produced an equally lugubrious painting for her, No Tidings, of a cowering family gathered in a cottage interior, waiting for what is clearly going to be dire news. Visitors to the exhibition can judge which patron got the better bargain, as the two paintings are brought together for the first time.

Among the artists who regarded Holl as a master was Vincent van Gogh, who collected the engravings produced for the Graphic, a high-minded journal Holl co-founded, which became known for scenes depicting the harsh lives of the urban and rural poor.

Another patron was the artist in whose honour the gallery was created, GF Watts – like Holl a Victorian giant whose reputation crashed and only began to recover in the late 20th century. Watts not only praised Holl's work, but passed on portrait commissions that he felt too busy for or unsuited to. When Watts found the company of the louche Prince of Wales – the future Edward VII – intolerable, Holl turned out a handsome portrait.

When Holl died, Watts wrote to his widow: "I beg you to believe that no one had greater admiration for your husband's genius." Ironically, the work Watts passed on helped kill the younger artist. By the end of his life he was working from dawn till dusk, with portrait commissions stacked up.

Some of the paintings are still cherished in private houses or on boardroom walls, but many borrowed for the exhibition, including those from national collections, have been in store for more than a century.

"What happened to poor Frank is really a mystery," co-curator Mary McMahon said. "I think it's partly that he died so young; there was never a major publication on his work, and because so much of his work was privately commissioned they never came up at sales, and people literally just lost sight of him. But he is a wonderful painter. I think people are going to be amazed by his quality when they come to this exhibition."