Gone, c1877 by Frank Holl, in which women at Euston station grieve for a father and son newly departed for Liverpool en route to a new life in America. Photograph: Geffrye Museum, London  When the Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey, reopened after its long refurbishment in 2011, its director, Perdita Hunt, told me she hoped it would become a centre for excellence not only for the study of the artist after whom it is named, but for Victorian art in general. At the time I wondered about this. The place looked magnificent: the scarlet and emerald main galleries; the new sculpture studio, in which towers George Frederic Watts's huge gesso grosso model of Tennyson and his wolfhound, Karenina. But the rooms available to standalone exhibitions were scant – there are just two – and rather small and dark. What kind of survey would work in these spaces? I couldn't picture it.  Sometimes, though – I see this now – a small show works a thousand times better than a massive retrospective. No one wants to be footsore and weary in the cause of an artist whose work they don't know well, but if an exhibition can be walked in only 20 minutes, we will be more inclined to pay attention, and perhaps leave wanting more. This is exactly the case with Frank Holl: Emerging from the Shadows, a survey of one of GF Watts's most talented contemporaries, mounted in partnership with the Mercer gallery in Harrogate. The two rooms take you swiftly through Holl's career, from his childhood to his early death in 1888 at the age of 43, and this journey is so absorbing – there are, I think, two or three really unmissable paintings along the way – it's with something of a start that you realise you've come to the end. Will it make Holl as famous as he was in his day? No. Victorian art – particularly the subject painting to which he devoted the first half of his career – has been out of fashion for a very long time; tastes were changing even while he was alive. (As his eldest daughter, Ada Mabel Reynolds, wrote in her 1912 biography of her father: "The mind of our time is turned, and justly turned, obstinately against this tradition.") But those who take the trouble to see this jewel of an exhibition will certainly be on the lookout for his name next time they're wandering the Walker, the Tate, or any of the other great institutions that have his work in their collections.  Holl was born in 1845, the son of a well-known engraver, and it was from his father that he learned the rudiments of drawing. At 15, he was accepted to the Royal Academy schools, where he won a gold medal for his religious painting, Abraham About to Sacrifice Isaac. In 1869 his first great subject picture – it has the ostentatiously gloomy title The Lord Gave and the Lord Hath Taken Away, and depicts a mourning family at the dinner table – was considered such a success that the Academy awarded him a prestigious two-year travelling scholarship. Holl was by now married, but this was a huge honour and he dutifully headed off to Europe to study the old masters. Arriving in Venice, however, he decided that the south did not appeal: according to his daughter, he had an "unconscious preference for the graver, greyer aspect of life". Relinquishing the scholarship – a dramatic move for a young and not yet well-known artist – he decided to return home. From now on, Britain and its people would be his inspiration, and he began with No Tidings From the Sea (1870), a commission from Queen Victoria, who had been frustrated in her attempts to buy The Lord Gave and the Lord Hath Taken Away. The painting – a family prays for a trawlerman's return – was inspired by the fishing community of Cullercoats in Northumberland, where the Holls spent a summer holiday.  And so his career as a subject painter was established. The Watts show includes both of the above, and more in similar vein. Some, it's true, are cloyingly sentimental. But others – especially if you ignore their mawkish titles – tug at the heart in less manipulative fashion. My favourite is Gone (1877), a painting that began its life as an engraving for The Graphic, the illustrated weekly for which Holl worked for several years. It depicts a platform at Euston, just after the 9.15pm to Liverpool has left; a family of women are grieving the departure of their father and son, gone to a new life across the Atlantic. Vincent Van Gogh, who loved Holl's engravings, was particularly struck by the scene's central female figure, and in the oil, too, it's to her that the eye is drawn: the pretty mauve of her shawl and the bright turquoise of her apron are in stark opposition to her face, bruised with misery. It's a contrast that is masterfully deployed, tender and beautiful.  In the 1880s, however, Holl's career changed direction entirely; alert to shifting tastes, infuriated by the critics' attitudes to his subject paintings, and keen to increase his income, he turned to portraiture. It's hard to imagine, now, how competitive a business painting portraits was in the late 19th century, and Holl had to be prolific (also, occasionally, to open his grand house in Hampstead to the public, the better to exhibit his artistic success to potential clients), and it was perhaps his astonishing work rate in this period that contributed to his premature death; in a photograph from 1880 he looks more like an anxious industrialist than an artist. Even so, one is grateful that he made this move: his remarkable portraits, sober but full of feeling, are the best part of this exhibition, calling to mind those of Holl's great idol, Rembrandt. John Tenniel, the cartoonist, is flushed of cheek, as if suppressing a laugh; the artist's father, Francis Holl, frowns in such a way as to suggest that his son's tendency to worry was genetic; Sir William Gilbert, the librettist, is sumptuously calm in velveteen corduroy; Gladstone, perhaps because Holl was so terrified by this commission ("I felt like a man about to walk the slack wire before the world…"), looks half mad, all flashing eyes and bulging knuckles.  Only in novels have I ever had such gripping encounters with Victorian gentlemen, and for this experience alone I'm glad I made the trip to Compton. If you like bristling moustaches, I urge you to do the same. But even if you don't, this is a treat: delicate and interesting, every picture telling so much more than one story.
Queen Victoria was desperate to own a Frank Holl painting. This jewel of an exhibition shows why, writes Rachel Cooke