Mary Seton Watts: Unsung Heroine of the Art Nouveau (1998)

MARY SETON WATTS, Symbolist craftswoman, socialist and pioneer of Liberty’s Celtic style, created one of the most remarkable Art Nouveau buildings in Britain, the Watts Chapel in Compton, Surrey.

Born in India and brought up at Aldourie, Inverness-shire, she abandoned portrait painting on her marriage to the famous Victorian artist George Frederic Watts in 1886. Mary Watts began to design symbolic bas-reliefs, developing a sensuous Celtic style intertwined with ancient pantheistic imagery and modern Art Nouveau.

She designed Compton’s jewel-like mortuary chapel in order to train villagers to model its terracotta tiles, to create their own heritage, and sought advice from leading craftsmen Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, Alexander Fisher, William de Morgan and Phoebe Traquair. The intricate exterior aroused such interest that before work on the startling polychrome interior began Mrs Watts set up professional Arts and Crafts communities in Compton and Aldourie. Their innovative terracotta garden ornaments, recommended by Gertrude Jekyll, decorated gardens throughout Britain and abroad.

Mrs Watts drew on the dynamic Symbolist vocabulary permeating the chapel for Liberty’s first Celtic Revival carpet, book-bindings, metalwork, textiles and Compton’s characteristic coloured ware. Her first retrospective exhibition coincides with the Watts Chapel centenary and reassesses Mary Watts as an inspired creative figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement.