| Description | Description
George Frederic Watts was a Victorian painter and sculptor. This collection contains his correspondence from the age of about thirty, until his death as well as correspondence to and from his widow, Mary Seton Watts, relating to the return of his letters. The collection was amalgamated, selected and arranged by his widow Mary Seton Watts in order to write his biography, 'Annals of an Artists Life'.
The collection contains G. F. Watts' personal and business correspondence and personal manuscript notes including drafted letters and ideas. The volumes and loose material includes original letters to and from Watts and numerous handwritten or typed transcriptions of his letters. Most of the transcriptions relate to privately owned letters, the whereabouts of which may be unknown. The letters record appointments for sittings and everyday matters such as invitations to dinner, visits to and from friends, concert performances and other social engagements as well as more notable parts of the collection which include correspondence with persons within Watts' inner circle and subjects of his portraiture including William Ewart Gladstone, Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, PRA, Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, 1st Duke of Westminster, Cecil Rhodes, George Meredith, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, James Martineau, Henry Austin Bruce Aberdare, 1st Baron, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, 2nd Baronet PC, Henry Edward Manning, Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster and Sir Antonio Genesio Maria Panizzi; correspondence with principal patrons including the Manchester merchant Charles Hilditch Rickards and the Ionides family; correspondence with the art suppliers Winsor and Newton and J. Scott Taylor of the North London Colour Works concerning technical matters, including pigments, canvasses, paint stability, varnishes, oils and brushes; correspondence with his circle of female friends including Mrs Jane Nassau Senior, Mrs Percy Wyndham, Lady Anne Isabella Ritchie and Julia Margaret Cameron; correspondence with Mary Gertrude Mead, who organised the exhibition of his paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York 1884-1885.
Admin History
The collection was amalgamated and arranged by G. F. Watts' widow, Mary Seton Watts (née Fraser Tytler).
Mary Seton Watts was born in 1849, the third daughter of Charles Fraser-Tytler, then a civil servant in India. She was brought up in Aldourie Castle, Inverness-shire and was educated there, before studying art in Dresden, Rome, at the South Kensington Art Training School, The Slade, and also as a pupil of Aimeé-Jules Dalou, from whom she learnt clay-modelling. She was first introduced to George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) the Victorian painter and sculptor, by a family friend in 1870, but she had long been an admirer of his work. They married in November 1886. Whilst living in London, Mary became involved in the Home Arts and Industries Association, and also began a clay-modelling class for shoeblacks in Whitechapel. In 1891 the couple had a house built for them in the Surrey village of Compton. In the grounds of their new home Limnerslease, Mary discovered good quality clay, and began pottery classes, teaching the villagers of Compton how to model. In 1891 Compton Parish Council announced it required a new burial ground, and Mary put in a request to design a Chapel. This accepted, Mary began work on the design, a model of which was completed in 1895. Supervising villagers whom she employed to undertake the building work, the Compton Mortuary Chapel was dedicated in 1898, blending together Celtic influence and the emerging Art Nouveau style, a fitting example of the Home Arts and Industries ideals she championed. With the Chapel interior remaining to be completed, Mary decided to establish a professional pottery business and the Compton Pottery and the Potters' Art Guild were born, both of which existed until the 1950's. She also designed a small chapel at the Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot (c.1914-1918). A devoted wife to 'Signor', she outlived her husband by 34 years. Following G. F. Watts' death Mary dedicated herself to creating a biography of Watts' life and in July 1905 she wrote to The Athenaeum, The Manchester Guardian, The Times and The Spectator appealing for the return of her husband's letters to be copied and returned. The biography 'Annals of an Artists Life' was published in 1912. She also oversaw the establishment of the Watts Gallery in Compton to house a permanent exhibition of her husband's studio collection, which opened to the public in 1904, shortly before his death. Mary died in 1938.
Custodial History
The Watts correspondence was collected by Watts' second wife, Mary Seton Watts, and mounted into fifteen volumes. These were deposited, amongst other material in the Watts Gallery following the death of Mary Seton Watts in 1938. In 1972 when G. F. Watts and Mary Seton Watts' adopted daughter and heir Lilian Chapman (née Mackintosh) died, her son Ronald Chapman claimed that the fifteen volumes of correspondence and various paintings, sketchbooks and pieces of sculpture belonged to the Chapman family, not the Watts Gallery. Following a lengthy court battle between Ronald Chapman and the Trustees of the Watts Gallery it was decided that the correspondence would pass to Ronald Chapman due to the lack of evidence of a recorded act of Lilian Chapman gifting the correspondence to the Watts Gallery. The collection was subsequently broken up with letters removed from the volumes and on 14 March 1979 the correspondence was sold at auction in 34 lots at Sotheby's, London. The National Portrait Gallery bought 14 of the 15 bound volumes and approximately half of the loose correspondence which had been removed from the volumes by the Chapman estate.
Arrangement
The correspondence and manuscript material was amalgamated and arranged by Mary Seton Watts into fifteen bound volumes (of which the National Portrait Gallery has 14) [GFW/1/1-5, GFW/1/7-15], a collection of loose manuscript material [GFW/1/16] and a collection of letters relating to Watts' relationship with J. Scott Taylor of the North London Colour Works [GFW/1/17]. The items within the bound volumes and collection of loose manuscript material were individually numbered in running order per volume before they were broken up prior to the sale of the collection in 1979. This running order has been maintained within the cataloguing of the collection so as to reflect the original arrangement used by Mary Seton Watts [GFW/1/1-16]. The collection of letters relating to Watts and J. Scott Taylor did not contain individual letter numbers and so have been arranged chronologically [GFW/1/17]. |