Lovely Limnerslease
Neil McAllister explores Watts Gallery Artists’ Village, including the picturesque Surrey home of Mary and George Frederic Watts.
ASKED to name a famous British painter, many people would come up with Constable and Turner. But not many would recall the name George Frederic Watts, considered in his day “England’s Michelangelo”.
Just as Victorian furniture has fallen out of favour in recent years, so has the high art which brought this artist such contemporary acclaim.
Yet Watts was an innovator, not content with achieving a mere likeness, aiming to “paint ideas, not things” and using symbols to represent and convey emotion in his personal work.
As well as achieving critical acclaim, he was also very commercial.
By the time of his death in the early years of the 20th century, he had established a unique community, which almost 120 years later is an important legacy.
The village of Compton in the gentle Surrey Hills is one of those “drive through and you’ve missed it” places, transited by commuters en route to London or nearby
Guildford.
At first glance, the village looks unpromising, with a boarded-up pub, but away from the traffic, this little town has a lively local community which reflects its agricultural roots.
As the 1890s approached, the newly married Mary and George Frederic Watts selected this community in which to build Limnerslease, their grand country home.
When they tied the knot in 1886, Mr Watts was almost seventy and one of Britain’s most famous artists.
For decades, everyone who was anyone in the Victorian era queued up to have their likenesses recorded by his hand.
Mary was 32 years younger than her spouse and already a painter and designer with a strong reputation in her own right, with modern ideas of how the family’s wealth could be used to improve the lives of others.
She envisaged their beautiful Arts and Crafts style house to be a community resource as much as a home.
With rooms to spare, some were opened to local villagers, who were encouraged to achieve personal development through their creativity.
This was a novel concept for agricultural workers, whose leisure hours would traditionally have been occupied in the pub.
Classes in modelling terracotta clay and drawing were held here, and before long a separate building was constructed over the road.
A commercial pottery was established, giving local artisans a workplace and income.
At the time, the idea of “Art for All” was a revolutionary concept, but the idea of helping people improve their lives was at the heart of the Arts and Crafts movement.
In Newlyn, fishermen were taught skills to fashion copper into useful and beautiful items to provide an income when the weather prevented them going to sea.
In the Cotswolds, the Guild of Handicrafts gave craftsmen an outlet for their jewellery, household goods and furniture.
In London, before her marriage, impoverished shoeshine boys were taught by Mary, then known as Mary Fraser Tytler.
As you might expect from someone so socially aware and active, Mary supported the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Society.
Today, Limnerslease’s drawing-room, where the classes were held, serves as the Mary Watts Gallery, part of a complex described as “a national gallery in the heart of a village”, where historic buildings, studios, workshops and, of course, a tea shop, nestle together around the village pond.
In 1900, Mary founded a local pottery, which evolved into Compton Potters’ Arts Guild, whose standards of design and making were so high they supplied Liberty & Co. in London until the pottery closed in the 1950s.
Whilst pottery is no longer crafted there, the building hosts an exhibition of contemporary art where work is sold, with profits supporting a variety of community projects.
During the pandemic, when these were paused, creative materials were distributed to prisoners, people with learning disabilities, single-parent families and disadvantaged children.
The Heritage Lottery
Fund made a huge contribution to restoring the site in 2008.
“The place was in very poor condition,” our guide explained, describing how the leaking gallery roof threatened the paintings below.
There are three main areas: Limnerslease House, the Gallery and Cemetery Chapel, the latter surrounded by yews and shaded by mature beech trees.
This was Mary Watts’s first major project, funded by her husband undertaking a number of portrait commissions.
The exterior is decorated by glorious terracotta panels, which are only eclipsed outside by the overlapping arched layers of pattern surrounding the doorway.
“One of the most beautiful, extraordinary, original, marvellous and magical buildings in the whole of the British Isles,” was Lucinda Lambton’s opinion – one shared
by my wife, Hazel, who kept showing me detailed pictures of the extraordinary interior captured on her phone.
Painted walls and the domed ceiling are covered in decoration, which is a magical synthesis of Art Nouveau and Celtic romanticism, which to my eye was reminiscent of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Anything not painted is gilded and patterned in a very beautiful, breathtaking way.
High above the chapel, George Watts’s memorial stands central in the cloister, alongside other fascinating plaques.
These include the ceramic wreath remembering Lieutenant Commander Wilfred Clayton, and another containing two bronze “death pennies” honouring the sacrifice of brothers Maurice and
Frank Pretyman.
Consecrated by the Bishop of Winchester in 1898, this working parish chapel has served the community in life and death for over a century.
Limnerslease’s woodland and gardens are available for visitors to enjoy before the ticket office opens.
Mary’s Celtic cross and bench in memory of her husband is in a peaceful spot amongst the trees on the woodland path leading to the beautiful, if dauntingly large, house.
After Mary died in the late 1930s, the house was sold and split into three.
In addition to Mary Watts’s Gallery, George’s studio has been restored, complete with a painting so large it was dropped into a hole in the floor to enable the artist to paint the top!
A few of the living-rooms are now also open, although they lack the original Arts and Crafts furniture.
Across the road, the now-restored gallery, completed a few months before the artist died, contains around a hundred of Watts’s paintings and sculptures, spanning 70 years’ output of his finest work.
Our plan had been to stay an hour or so, but a morning had passed in seconds.
After some lunch in the café, we set out on a short circular walk through the village.
Our walk cut through