Mary and George Watts, Can Be Viewed As A
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The following extract has kindly been provided by Dr Lucy Ella Rose, from her published work Suffragists Artists in Partnership. Edinburgh University Press (2018), Chapter 1 - Mary and George Watts. We are grateful to Lucy for allowing this to be used as part of ‘The March of the Women’ project resource. Practice and Partnership Much has been written about the famous Victorian artist George Watts, and yet the life and work of Mary Watts, and the couple’s progressive socio-political positions as conjugal creative partners and women’s rights supporters, are comparatively neglected. Long-eclipsed by the dominant critical focus on her husband, and known primarily as the worshipping wife of a world-famous artist, Mary was a pioneering professional woman designer and ceramicist as well as a painter, illustrator and writer. Despite her prominence in her own lifetime, she is little-known today. The lack of critical and biographical material on her is disproportionate to the originality, high quality and multi-faceted nature of her oeuvre, encompassing fine art, gesso relief, sculpture, ceramic and textile design, and architecture. Art historian Mark Bills’s chapter on the Wattses in An Artists’ Village: G. F. Watts and Mary Watts at Compton (Bills 2011: 9–23) incorporates the brief sections ‘Married Life’ and ‘A Partnership’, and yet they perpetuate rather than challenge traditional views of the couple. The former section presents Mary ‘in awe of [George], overwhelmed by his reputation […] as devoted and admiring as ever […] in her subservient role’ (2011: 14–15). Bills alludes to, without contesting, the popular public perception of Mary as George’s ‘nurse’ and ‘slave’ who ‘worshipped him blindly’ (2011: 15-16). This partial and reductive view of Mary is reinforced by the latter section, beginning, ‘The position of Mary as acolyte and servant to the genius of [George] was constant’ (2011: 16). Although her involvement in the HAIA and her achievement as an artist in her construction of the Watts Chapel is acknowledged, Mary is severely undervalued here as in most existing scholarship. Building 1 on the work of Veronica Franklin Gould (1998), Melanie Unwin (2004) and Elaine Cheasley Paterson (2005), this chapter and book as a whole aims to rectify omissions and misconceptions of the Wattses: it develops a discussion of Mary’s feminist activism and of the Wattses’ partnership in unprecedented depth, showing how this subverted the relations they have long been seen to represent. Mary’s creative practices and progressive views were cultivated by her liberal upbringing in the Scottish Highlands and art education in London. Her father, himself a writer, encouraged her and her sisters to pursue their creative interests (Gould 1998: 20), and (unlike Evelyn De Morgan) she experienced no maternal resistance to her artistic career, since her mother died not long after her birth.i Both Mary and Evelyn were ‘born just at the right time ... the turn of the middle of the nineteenth century’ (Jefferies 2006: 28) when debates about the status of women were already underway, and women were first offered the opportunity to undertake formal, vocational training in the arts and crafts. Mary and Evelyn were among the first wave of women to receive this training, upon which they embarked with gusto, carving out creative careers for themselves. Like many suffrage artists, they studied at the co-educational Slade School of Fine Art in London (established 1871), enrolling soon after it opened in 1873 as two of its first female students. Mary first met the world-famous painter George Watts as an awestruck pupil at (old) Little Holland House in Kensington in 1870, and ‘embraced this opportunity to further her career – arguably the most significant step of her life’ (Gould 1998: 22). Mary and George visited each other’s studios before their engagement, when they would ‘bemoan the stifling effect of the Machine Age on individual creative design and yearn for the revival of craftsmanship’ (Gould 1998: 24). They believed in the transformative power of art – both personal and socio-political – and in ‘art for all’. Mary greatly influenced George’s support of the wider aesthetic aims of the Arts and Crafts movement that she personally promoted. 2 While Mary ‘looked towards [George] for her development as an artist’ (Bills 2011: 13) when she was specialising in portraiture during the 1870s and early 1880s, and his influence on her early painting is evident, she had studied art formally, been a committee member of the HAIA and given clay modelling classes before her marriage. Although her reputation as an artist was advanced and sustained by her marital partnership, and George financially supported some of her artistic enterprises, her skills were not dependent upon – and her training and practice long preceded – this union. Contrary to popular belief, Mary was not the docile and submissive ‘wife in an unequal marriage ... trapped in the dependent position in the hierarchies of personalized [patriarchal] power relations’ (Aaron 1991: 27). The Wattses’ affectionate correspondence in the lead up to their engagement and marriage in 1886 reveals their early relationship to be based on equality. Mary wrote to George, ‘I grow when I am with you’, and George wrote to Mary, ‘I have come to feel for you the most profound and tender respect’ (qtd. in Chapman 1945: 114, 116). George assured Mary that he would not limit her freedom in marriage, writing, ‘the door of your cage shall be wide open and there shall be no wires’ (qtd. in Chapman 1945: 120). He guaranteed her treatment as an autonomous equal and offered her an alternative to the conjugal bondage experienced by many Victorian women, which undoubtedly influenced her decision to marry him; her aversion to the ‘moral wrong’ of forced and loveless marriage is evident in her diaries (1891: 22 November). Mary consciously chose as her husband an artist she greatly admired who supported both her creative practice and her socio-political beliefs. As artists, symbolists, philanthropists and suffragists who supported greater female liberation and participation in the arts, the Wattses were partners who shared the same ideals in art and life, and ‘suit[ed] each other […] absolutely’ (G. Watts qtd. in M. Watts 1887: 9 September). 3 In order to trace the development of Mary’s creative partnership with George, an exploration of the place in which it was primarily initiated and facilitated – the marital home and artistic space of their Surrey studio-home – is essential. As Bills points out, if life had continued solely at George’s London residence, Mary’s art may never have developed to the extent that it did (2011: 16). George’s studio-home that he had commissioned at the centre of an artistic community in Kensington had a stifling effect on her own work when they first married. She effectively stopped canvas painting thereafter, apparently to avoid being adversely compared with him and to dedicate herself to supporting him once she had been (as her brother wrote in a letter of 1886) ‘give[n] […] to the nation’ (qtd. in Chapman 1945: 127) as his wife. Feeling artistically frustrated, Mary wrote in her diary while living in what was ‘already a monument’ (Bills 2011: 15) to George, ‘instead of my work, I focus [on] him. […] It will take me a little while yet to get over being under the shadow of his great work’ (1887: 7 September). Although Mary initially struggled to establish a distinct identity in her partnership with George, she found a form of liberation in the move from busy London to rural Surrey and fine art to decorative art, which was pivotal to her professional development. The Wattses’ studio-home at Compton in the Surrey Hills, a winter residence that became the ‘true centre of [Mary’s] life’ (Tromans 2016: 6) until her death, was built under her supervision in 1890–1. Mary transformed the interior itself into a work of art with her highly imaginative and ambitious schemes of symbolic decoration – including her intricately crafted plaster ceiling panels of stylised gesso symbols inspired by ancient cultures, her decorated reading alcove or ‘niche’, her Celtic fireplace surround designs and bed ends – thereby marking her territory and bringing a whole new meaning to Victorian homemaking. The Wattses worked together, sometimes in the same studio or alongside each other in adjacent studios, in this house and its grounds. They named it ‘Limnerslease’ – ‘limner’ being Latin 4 for ‘artist’ and ‘leasen’ being the Old English word meaning ‘to glean’ – in the hope that golden years of creativity would be gleaned from this studio-home. Together they established a work ethic within their shared domestic space, and Mary’s diary writing reveals the happiness they found in a household routine that revolved around artistic productivity. Entries such as, ‘I began my work when [George] did this morning […] We had both a hard day of work’ (1893: 13–15 May), pervade her diaries, and Mary records George exclaiming, ‘How delightful it is to work together in this way!’ (1891: 21 September). Contradicting critics’ suggestions that ‘the constant presence of [Mary’s] husband in the home was somewhat restrictive’ (Unwin 2004: 245), Mary writes, ‘I am now doing what I purposed to do, at the beginning of my life with Signor & it makes it the most delightful work I have ever done’ (1891: 12 March). Mary notes in her diary not long after their marriage, ‘A lovely day, life seems like a dream […] My loved one working […] & I with my easel below him in the garden designing’ (1887: 30 July). While Unwin claims that Mary was ‘the wife of an artist forced to negotiate a “career” around her husband’ (2004: 239), Mary’s diaries suggest their facilitating roles in each other’s creative practices, and show how she developed an artistic career within her marriage and in partnership with her husband.