Watson married Roxanna (Roxa for short) Bechtel in 1881, and the couple moved into the Drake House at Doon. They bought the house in 1883, and he kept the house as his permanent residence until his death. Watson painted the rural Grand River countryside for most of his artistic life. He was noted for his commitment to Canadian landscapes: he said at a lecture on "The Methods of Some Great Landscape Painters" at the University of Toronto in 1900: "there is at the bottom of each artistic conscience a love for the land of their birth... no immortal work has been done which has not as one of its promptings for its creation a feeling its creator had of having roots in his native land and being a product of its soil".