The Watts Gallery and Mortuary Chapel in Compton, Surrey, have long been places of pilgrimage for anyone fascinated by Victorian art and architecture. But now, with the aid of a £2.4m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the studios where George Frederic Watts and his wife Mary worked have also been restored and opened to the public by the Watts Gallery Trust under its director, Perdita Hunt.
Watts, popular, prolific and unabashedly high-minded, was active throughout Queen Victoria’s long reign. Though a Londoner from birth, as he neared old age, he found the capital’s pollution increasingly trying; after his marriage to the artist and designer Mary Seton Fraser-Tytler in 1886, he leased the Compton land — a hilltop site with panoramic views of the surrounding woodland — and commissioned the Arts and Crafts architect Ernest George to design the capacious house he called “Limnerslease”. The couple moved in on July 18 1891.
As you walk into Watts’s lofty studio, it is the enormous south-facing window that is most striking. Watts loved to rise long before dawn and to see how the advent of daylight transformed his paintings. He also relished the challenge of monumental compositions, and one of his biggest paintings has returned here, on extended loan from Tate. Called “The Court of Death”, it dramatises Watts’s obsession with mortality. This overwhelming canvas, which he worked on for more than three decades (1870-1902), has been placed on a reconstruction of the pulley system devised by Watts for moving paintings up and down while he worked on them.
Wandering round the studio, one gets a strong sense of this tireless artist’s preoccupations. His palette and brushes rest on a table, and nearby an image from the Sistine Chapel ceiling testifies to his love of Michelangelo (he was dubbed “England’s Michelangelo”). A Van Dyck reproduction can be found on another table, and throughout the studio are fragments of classical sculpture, notably a reproduction of a figure from the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum.
Although Watts was esteemed as a portraitist, he never wanted to devote all his energies to painting eminent Victorian sitters — although radical women fascinated him, and one vigorously handled canvas in the studio turns out to be an unfinished portrait of Florence Nightingale. Haunted by the transience of life, he kept a skeleton in his studio cupboard and constantly laboured over such elaborate allegories as the immense “Love Steering The Boat of Humanity” (c.1900).
Living in the Surrey Hills also made him determined to tackle landscape painting. One of the resulting works, dominated by freely brushed images of trees, is displayed on an easel in his studio. A photograph survives of Watts painting avidly outdoors, as close as possible to the natural world he cherished.
Mary, 32 years his junior, was an extraordinary force, and her newly restored studio is alive with evidence of an irrepressible dynamism. No less idealistic than her husband, she dedicated herself to social enterprises. Her studio doubled as a teaching room for villagers who wanted to help create terracotta tiles and panels for her Mortuary Chapel in Compton’s cemetery nearby. The chapel became an Arts and Crafts showpiece, and a new model of the chapel, by Henry Milner, is on display in Mary’s studio. So is a series of decorative friezes, in gesso and wood, which she made for the Cambridge Military Hospital Chapel in Aldershot — long-neglected religious works that have now been fully conserved.
Fascinating examples of pottery can also be seen in Mary’s studio, testifying to her success in establishing the Compton Potters’ Arts Guild co-operative with local villagers. It won contracts with Liberty & Co as well as commissions from architects including Edwin Lutyens.
For several years before her husband’s death in 1904, Mary devoted a great deal of time to helping the octogenarian Watts carry on working. The depth of her feelings is poignantly revealed in her watercolour of him lying in bed, ill and fragile. She eventually died in 1938, and now the full extent of her commitment to a wide range of projects — she also ran the local branch of the Women’s Suffrage Society — is celebrated in the newly opened studio. The rescue of this important artists’ house reveals its significance as a power-hub for the work created by both husband and wife.
Resource: http://www.ft.com
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