George Frederic Watts & Mary Watts

10 Nov

I recently got to visit the Watts Gallery & Artist Village in Compton, Surrey. This was the former home of George Frederic Watts, one of the preeminent artists of the Victorian period and that of his second wife Mary, who was in turn a gifted potter. The Watts were close friends with many contemporary bohemian artists that lived in South London and whose works can be found in the Gallery.

Barack Obama, 2008 Hope Presidential Campaign

Artistically, Watts was close with the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic movement. His style is mostly associated with the Belgian/French Symbolist movement, which aspired to ‘represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images’. The Symbolists just like the Pre-Raphaelites were reactionist in ethos, railing against the pursuit of naturalism and realism taught in the great academies of the period.

Watts’s most famous painting is Hope, from 1886, which depicts a blind figure playing a harp with a single string, as she sits atop the world. The work went on to inspire Dr Martin Luther King’s Shattered Dreams sermon, which was attended by a young Barack Obama. This in turn, went on to inspire Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, which famously featured the Hope poster designed by Shepherd Fayre.

Besides metaphor rich and allegorical paintings, Watts was a talented portraitist and sculptor. He captured the likeness of various Chelsea residents, including the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founder Dante Gabriel Rossetti and historian Thomas Carlyle. In these portraits Watts pursues a Rembrandt style palette of colours. Not too far from Chelsea in Kensington Gardens, one can find his mammoth Physical Energy bronze statue. This shows a man scanning the horizon, ready to take head on any challenges that the future holds. In the house of the Watts, which can be visited along with the Gallery, there is the original gesso full size model of this bronze.

Furthermore in London, for the Queen Golden Jubilee in 1887, Watts and his wife created the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, which can be seen in Postman's Park in the City of London. This was meant to memorialise common people who had sacrificed their lives to save others, at a time when there were no official honours for such selfless acts. The tiles memorialising these heroes and their deeds were made by Watts’s friend William De Morgan, arguably the greatest Arts & Crafts potter of the 19th century.

Evening Star Over the Sea, Evelyn De Morgan

The Gallery holds a fantastic collection of De Morgan’s famous plates, ewers and jugs with their recognisable colour schemes and metallic lustre, a technique he developed in his garden at 30 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. In the collection are also works by William’s wife, Evelyn De Morgan, another Pre-Raphaelite of the Burne-Jones streak. I was excited to see her Evening Star Over the Sea, which Brian Barnes incorporated in his mural Battersea in Perspective, to be found on Dagnall Street, Battersea. You can read an article about Brian Barnes and his murals here.

The De Morgan, had strong links with Fulham, where William setup his pottery works, and Battersea, where Evelyn’s sister Wilhelmina Stirling founded the William De Morgan Foundation for the Appreciation of 19th Century Art. The collection which included paintings by Evelyn and her uncle John Roddam Spencer Stanhope was first housed in Old Battersea House, on Vicarage Crescent and later in the Wandsworth Reference Library on West Hill. Unfortunately this was closed a few years back and the collection dispersed between the Ashmolean Museum and Cannon Hall.

George Watts wife was also a talented artist and potter. Besides promoting her husband’s work after his death and running the Artist Village, her greatest project is just a short walk from the Watts Gallery, the Watts Mortuary Chapel. This is a stunning red brick circular drum building representing the Circle of Eternity, intersected by a cross layout symbolising the Cross of Faith. It is a marvellous blend of Art Nouveau, Romanesque and Celtic features, with terracotta decorations on the outside. The interior of the chapel shows orders of angels linked by the Tree of Life.

Tickets to visit Watts Gallery are £13.50, but discounts are given to English heritage members and for this who use the National Rail 2 for1 entry travelling scheme.