Study Day:

Mary Watts: Victorian Progressive and Artistic Visionary

Monday 7 November

11 am – 4-30pm

£45 (includes refreshments and lunch)

Pre-booking required

Clore Learning Studio at Watts Studios

Mary Watts (1849-1938) was one of the most versatile British designers of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her work is now recognised in the Mary Watts Gallery at the Watts Studios which opened in 2016.

Join us for a study day devoted to her life and work, led by leading specialists in the field. Take part in the rediscovery of the many fascinating aspects of Mary Watts's career.

Keynote Speaker — Professor Murdo Macdonald, Professor of History of Scottish Art at the University of Dundee.

Other speakers include Dr Elaine Cheasley Paterson, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History at Concordia University in Montreal; Dr Desna Greenhow, editor Mary Watts’s diaries; Patricia Jackson, Senior Sculpture Conservator at the National Portrait Gallery; Dr Lucy Ella Rose, who is completing a book including new

research on the career of Mary Watts; Dr Zoë Thomas, who has just completed a PhD on the Women’s Guild of Arts; and Hilary Calvert and Dr Louise Boreham who are currently writing a book on the Compton Pottery.

The Study Day concludes with the official book launch of The Diary of Mary Watts, 1887-1904 (Lund Humphries) edited by Dr Desna Greenhow.

Mary Watts Study Day timetable

10.30

Registration and refreshments

10.50

Introduction to the day from Dr Nicholas Tromans, Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village Curator

11.00

Keynote speaker Professor Murdo Macdonald, History of Art, University of Dundee

11.30

Dr Desna Greenhow - “Straight to Signor's ear”: The interests of Mary Watts and G F Watts as revealed by their reading

11.50

Dr Lucy Ella Rose - Mary Watts: Forgotten Feminist

12.10

Hilary Calvert - Compton Pottery Grave Markers

12.30

Patricia Jackson – The gesso techniques of Mary Watts

12.50

Panel Q&A

13.10

Lunch in the Limnerslease Dining Room and Tour of the Mary Watts Gallery

14.20

Dr Zoe Thomas - Mary Seton Watts and the Women’s Guild of Arts

14.40

Dr Louise Boreham - The Aldourie Pottery and the role of Louis Reid Deuchars

15.00

Dr Elaine Cheasley Paterson – “Our Lady of the Snows”: Settlement, empire and “the children of Canada” in the needlework of Mary Seton Watts

15.20

Panel Q&A

15.45

The Legacy of Mary Watts – group discussion lead by Dr Nicholas Tromans

16.30

Close

5pm Launch of The Diary of Mary Watts, edited by Desna Greenhow

Speaker Biographies

Murdo Macdonald is Professor of History of Scottish Art at the University of Dundee. In his doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh he studied the relationships between art and science. He is a former editor of Edinburgh Review. His research has explored, among other things, the art of the Scottish Gàidhealtachd, the cultural milieu of Patrick Geddes, visual interpretations of the life and work of Robert Burns, and the aesthetics of the cloud chamber photography of the Scottish physicist and Nobel laureate C. T. R. Wilson. He has a longstanding interest in Ossian and art in an international context, which he explored as part of the Cesarotti project at the University of Padua in 2013. He is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He was made an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture in 2009, and an honorary fellow of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies in 2016.

Dr Desna Greenhow has worked as a teacher and lecturer. She restored Otterton Mill in Devon, became its Director and ran it as an Arts Centre and Working Museum from 1977 to 2002. She has written on a wide range of historical subjects. In recent years she has contributed to several Watts Gallery research projects and publications, and has just completed a transcription of the entire surviving portions of the diary of Mary Watts, her edited selection from which is being published by Lund Humphries in 2016.

Dr Lucy Ella Rose is Teaching Fellow in English at the University of Surrey, where she completed her PhD – awarded by the university and Watts Gallery – in 2015. She is currently writing her first book, Suffragist Artists in Partnership: Gender, Word and Image, for publication by Edinburgh University Press in 2017.

Hilary Calvert is an art pottery researcher and enthusiast who has been a regular visitor to Watts Gallery for the past twenty-five years. She has a large collection of Compton Pottery coloured ware and has published books both on Compton pottery and her other pottery collection, Chameleon Ware. She continues to research the history of the Potters’ Arts Guild and is the person who responds to ‘pottery queries’ sent in by the public to the Gallery.

Patricia Jackson is Senior Sculpture Conservator at the National Portrait Gallery, and is both an Accredited Conservator ICON and a Fellow of the International Institute of Conservation. Having initially trained as an Archaeological Conservator at the British Museum, Patricia later specialised in ceramics, glass and sculpture conservation. As well as working for the National Portrait Gallery, Patricia works as a private conservator for the National Trust and has worked for Watts Gallery for the past 10 years.

Dr Zoë Thomas finished her AHRC-funded PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London on the Women’s Guild of Arts in 2016 and is now a Teaching Fellow in Modern British History at the University of Birmingham. She is turning her doctorate into a book about women artists and the Arts and Crafts movement alongside co-editing a collection of essays for Bloomsbury with Miranda Garrett titled Suffrage and the Arts which will be published in 2018.

Dr Louise Boreham is a retired college head of department, whose research on the Compton and Aldourie potteries, stretches back to 1980 and continues today. She has written numerous articles, contributed to

books, radio and TV programmes and given many talks to a variety of interest groups.

Dr Elaine Cheasley Paterson is Chair of the Department of Art History at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She holds a PhD from Queen's University (Kingston, 2004), where she was a recipient of the Bader Fellowship in Art History. Her current funded research concerns women's cultural philanthropy in early twentieth-century British, Irish and Canadian craft guilds of the home arts movement and for tracing a lineage from this historical material to the current resurgence in DIY and craftivist practices. Her publications include Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), with Susan Surette; ‘Crafting Empire: Intersections of Irish and Canadian Women’s History,’ Journal of Canadian Art History (2014); ‘Decoration and Desire in the Watts Chapel’ in Gender and History (2005); ‘Crafting a National Identity' in The Irish Revival Reappraised (2004).

Dr Nicholas Tromans joined Watts Gallery—Artists’ Village in 2013 where he oversees the Collections, Displays and Exhibitions. He was Project Director of the HLF-funded restoration of the Watts Studios. His books include monographs on David Wilkie, Richard Dadd, G. F. Watts and British Orientalist painting.