The Compton Potters' Arts Guild was an art pottery, founded by and based at the Surrey home of Scottish artist, Mary Fraser Tytler.
The Compton Potters' Arts Guild was an art pottery, founded by and based at the Surrey home of Scottish artist, Mary Fraser Tytler.
A follower of the Home Arts and Industries Association, set up by Earl Brownlow in 1885 to encourage handicrafts among the lower classes, Fraser-Tytler, the wife of Victorian era painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts, had offered to design and build a new mortuary chapel when the council in Compton, Surrey were developing a new cemetery. [1] Setting up a local evening class, [2] led by Louis Deuchars, Mary got them designing and modelling designs guided by her and influenced by friends and crafts people: Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, Alexander Fisher, William De Morgan and Phoebe Traquair. [3]
The resultant Romanesque/Celtic revival exterior of the Watts Mortuary Chapel aroused such interest, that before work on the polychrome interior had started, Watts had set up permanent Arts and Crafts communities in both Compton and her home-town of Aldourie, Scotland. [3] The outputs of the Compton group resulted in the formation in 1899 of the Compton Potters' Arts Guild.
The innovative terracotta garden ornaments produced by the evening class group, recommended by Gertrude Jekyll, expanded into a production centre of mainly Gothic Revival, Arts and Crafts and latterly Art Nouveau style pottery, with many of its designs involved Celtic knots. The pottery's output was extensive, from large terracotta garden pottery to smaller household figures, jugs, plaques and pendants. In Green Lane cemetery, Farnham, there is a Compton Pottery memorial to May Margaret Barber, widow of Charles Burton Barber, the Victorian artist. [4]
After World War I, many pairs of bookends were made including Archers, Sunburst, Galleon, Fruit and Flowers. The majority of the pottery was made from a soft white body and decorated with tempera, an egg-based paint susceptible to wear and which washes off. [5]
Its designs and products were featured by many London shops, including Liberty & Co. One of its potters was featured in the first BBC filler intermission film, the well known 'Potter's Wheel'. [6]
After the death of its founder, the Guild continued until 1954, by which time competition from more modern designs had severely reduced its sales.
The Arts and Crafts movement was an international trend in the decorative and fine arts that developed earliest and most fully in the British Isles and subsequently spread across the British Empire and to the rest of Europe and America.
The Celtic Revival was a variety of movements and trends in the 19th and 20th centuries that saw a renewed interest in aspects of Celtic culture. Artists and writers drew on the traditions of Gaelic literature, Welsh-language literature, and so-called 'Celtic art'—what historians call Insular art. Although the revival was complex and multifaceted, occurring across many fields and in various countries in Northwest Europe, its best known incarnation is probably the Irish Literary Revival. Irish writers including William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, "AE" Russell, Edward Martyn, Alice Milligan and Edward Plunkett stimulated a new appreciation of traditional Irish literature and Irish poetry in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Mary Seton Fraser Tytler (1849–1938) was a symbolist craftswoman, designer and social reformer.
Compton is a village and civil parish in the Guildford district of Surrey, England. It is between Godalming and Guildford. It has a medieval church and a close connection to fine art and pottery, being the later life home of artist George Frederic Watts. The parish has considerable woodland and agricultural land, and the undeveloped portions are in the Metropolitan Green Belt. The village is traversed by the North Downs Way and has a large western conservation area. Central to the village are the Watts Gallery, the cemetery chapel commissioned by his wife for him, two inns and the parish church.
Royal Doulton is an English ceramic and home accessories manufacturer that was founded in 1815. Operating originally in Vauxhall, London, and later moving to Lambeth, in 1882 it opened a factory in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, in the centre of English pottery. From the start, the backbone of the business was a wide range of utilitarian wares, mostly stonewares, including storage jars, tankards and the like, and later extending to pipes for drains, lavatories and other bathroom ceramics. From 1853 to 1901, its wares were marked Doulton & Co., then from 1901, when a royal warrant was given, Royal Doulton.
Van Briggle Art Pottery was at the time of its demise the oldest continuously operating art pottery in the United States, having been established in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1901 by Artus and Anne Van Briggle. Artus had a significant impact on the Art Nouveau movement in the United States, and his pottery is foundational to American Art Pottery. The Art Nouveau style favored by its founders continues to influence the pottery's designs.
Watts Gallery – Artists' Village is an art gallery in the village of Compton, near Guildford in Surrey. It is dedicated to the work of the Victorian-era painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts.
The Overbeck sisters were American women potters and artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement who established Overbeck Pottery in their Cambridge City, Indiana, home in 1911 with the goal of producing original, high-quality, hand-wrought ceramics as their primary source of income. The sisters are best known for their fanciful figurines, their skill in matte glazes, and their stylized designs of plants and animals in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles. The women owned and handled all aspects of their artistic enterprise until 1955, when the last of the sisters died and the pottery closed. As a result of their efforts, the Overbecks managed to become economically independent and earned a modest living from the sales of their art.
The Modern Style is a style of architecture, art, and design that first emerged in the United Kingdom in the mid-1880s. It is the first Art Nouveau style worldwide, and it represents the evolution of Arts and Crafts movement which was native to Great Britain. Britain not only provided the base and intellectual background for the Art Nouveau movement which was adapted by other countries to give birth to local variants; they also played an over-sized role in its dissemination and cultivation through the Liberty department store and The Studio magazine. The most important person in the field of design in general and architecture, in particular, was Charles Rennie Mackintosh. He created one of the key motifs of the movement, now known as the 'Mackintosh rose' or 'Glasgow rose'. The Glasgow school was also of tremendous importance, particularly due to a group closely associated with Mackintosh, known as 'The Four'. The Liberty store nurturing of style gave birth to two metalware lines, Cymric and Tudric.
Louis Reid Deuchars (1870–1927) was a Scottish artist and sculptor.
Farnham Pottery is located in Wrecclesham near Farnham, Surrey. This is one of the best preserved examples of a working Victorian country pottery left in England and is a grade II listed building. Its significance in the local area is shown by it featuring on the emblem of Wrecclesham Cricket Club.
The Watts Cemetery Chapel or Watts Mortuary Chapel is a chapel in an Modern Style version of Celtic Revival in the village cemetery of Compton in Surrey. While the overall architectural structure is loosely Romanesque Revival, in the absence of any appropriate Celtic models, the lavish decoration in terracotta relief carving and paintings is Celtic Revival, here seen on an unusually large scale. According to the local council, it is "a unique concoction of art nouveau, Celtic, Romanesque and Egyptian influence with Mary's own original style". Other responses have been less positive. Ian Nairn, in the 1971 Surrey volume of the Buildings of England series, described the interior as "one of the most soporific rooms in England" and regretted "the intolerable torpor and weariness of the motifs". It is a Grade I listed building.
Art pottery is a term for pottery with artistic aspirations, made in relatively small quantities, mostly between about 1870 and 1930. Typically, sets of the usual tableware items are excluded from the term; instead the objects produced are mostly decorative vessels such as vases, jugs, bowls and the like which are sold singly. The term originated in the later 19th century, and is usually used only for pottery produced from that period onwards. It tends to be used for ceramics produced in factory conditions, but in relatively small quantities, using skilled workers, with at the least close supervision by a designer or some sort of artistic director. Studio pottery is a step up, supposed to be produced in even smaller quantities, with the hands-on participation of an artist-potter, who often performs all or most of the production stages. But the use of both terms can be elastic. Ceramic art is often a much wider term, covering all pottery that comes within the scope of art history, but "ceramic artist" is often used for hands-on artist potters in studio pottery.
The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice is a public monument in Postman's Park in the City of London, commemorating ordinary people who died saving the lives of others and who might otherwise have been forgotten. It was first proposed by painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts in 1887, to commemorate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria. The scheme was not accepted at that time, and in 1898 Watts was approached by Henry Gamble, vicar of St Botolph's Aldersgate church. Postman's Park was built on the church's former churchyard, and the church was at that time trying to raise funds to secure its future; Gamble felt that Watts's proposed memorial would raise the profile of the park. The memorial was unveiled in an unfinished state in 1900, consisting of a 50-foot (15 m) wooden loggia designed by Ernest George, sheltering a wall with space for 120 ceramic memorial tiles to be designed and made by William De Morgan. At the time of opening, only four of the memorial tiles were in place. Watts died in 1904, and his widow Mary Watts took over the running of the project.
Mary Wondrausch was an English artist, potter, historian and writer, born in Chelsea. She trained as a potter at Farnham School of Art, latterly West Surrey College of Art and Design.
William George Paulson Townsend (1868–1941) was an English artist, designer, writer and editor.
Charles Counts (1934–2000) was an American potter, designer, textile artist, quilter, teacher, writer, and activist. Counts worked to preserve the art forms of his native Appalachia, and later moved to Nigeria where he taught until his death.
The Oxshott Pottery was set up by Denise Wren and Henry Wren at their home, Potters Croft, in Oxshott, Surrey in 1920. The pottery had a reputation as a successful studio pottery, producing brightly glazed earthenware pottery; examples of their work can be found in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Crafts Study Centre, Farnham, Surrey, and Kingston Museum Art Gallery.
Denise Wren was an Australian-born British studio potter and craftsperson. Wren was one of the first female studio potters in Britain. She studied and taught with the Kingston School of Art, Knox Guild and Camberwell College of Arts. Wren and her family subsequently set up the Oxshott Pottery and wrote on the subjects of ceramics, textiles and making.
Art Nouveau temples are churches, chapels, synagogues, and mosques built in the style known as Art Nouveau in French and English languages, Jugendstil in Germany and Nordic countries, Secessionsstil in countries of former Austro-Hungary, Modernisme in Catalan or Modern in Russian. As National Romantic style is also referred to Art Nouveau, churches of that style are also listed here, as well as some temples not of pure Art Nouveau style but with distinctive Art Nouveau features.