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 multifaceted 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 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.