An Artists’ Village: G. F. Watts and Mary Watts at Compton edited by Mark Bills, and: Hope: The Life and Times of a Victorian Icon by Nicholas Tromans (review)

George Frederic Watts has long been deemed a visionary painter whose abstract figural allegories and painting style inspired symbolists on the Continent as well as twentiethcentury artists. Critical reception of this artist, as with many of his peers, shifted markedly in the last century, with many reviews decidedly dismissive. As the foreword to An Artists’ Village acknowledges, this extended to Watts’s Compton home, studio, and chapel, once damned as dull by the infamous Pevsner series on Britain’s architecture, with “soporific rooms” and “intolerable torpor and weariness of motifs” (7). This volume reflects altered attitudes toward not only the Watts’s mortuary chapel, but also the distinctive partnership of G. F. and his second wife, Mary Seton Watts.

Compton, originally a retreat from London for both Wattses, evolved over time into an artistic center for potters and other artisans, a gallery for Watts’s paintings, and an extraordinary mortuary chapel. In Mark Bills’s first of three essays, he gives refreshingly equal voice to both husband and wife and their impressive teamwork. By the time they built their home from 1890 to 1891, G. F. Watts was already internationally famous, assuming the poet-painter mantle from Dante Gabriel Rossetti and moving in a decidedly otherworldly, cosmic direction. While there are several fairly recent books on G. F. Watts’s artistic development, one of the principal contributions of Bills’s work is its situation of Mary Watts as a notable artist and innovator in her own right. In their adopted country environment, both she and her spouse forged a partnership, with Mary Watts becoming intensely involved in the Home Arts and Industries Association and in the design of the mortuary chapel. Although Bills notes that she “asserts her artistic independence from Watts in both the predominant Christian message and the use of traditional symbolism in the chapel,” more could have been said about how unusual this achievement was in the degree of control Mary Watts as a wife exerted on complex design projects and her supervision of the pottery guild (18). Planning their house, Limnerslease, and chapel energized her sculpture and general career, both during her husband’s lifetime and after his death in 1904. A separate chapter by Bills on the house confirms the ways in which Limnerslease, a winter retreat from Little Holland House and hectic London, functioned also as a workplace for both husband and wife. This essay is particularly useful for the rediscovered images and trenchant analysis it offers about interior, garden, and studio spaces, and such matters as G. F. Watts’s preference for southern light.

Another vital contribution occurs in Hilary Underwood’s chapter on Mary Watts’s commanding role in the Home Arts and Industries Association, which offered classes in woodcarving, pottery, textiles, brasswork, and other areas. This organization became “a vehicle through which she could work publicly in a manner acceptable for a woman of her class and generation” (47). One area that is briefly mentioned but deserves expansion treats her involvement in art loans to the Whitechapel Art Gallery, which strove—in a Ruskinian mode—to improve the quality of lives of working-class visitors through elevating exposure to art. Indeed, John Ruskin’s support of the Arts and Crafts movement and of cultural philanthropy as a means to counteract some of the social ills of industrialized society were approaches shared by the Wattses. The influence of the Home Arts and Industries Association was widespread and more important than previously known. For example, by 1895, about five hundred classes were offered at this institution.

Veronica Franklin Gould’s essay on Mary Watts’s role in the creation of the Watts Chapel is, alas, very...