Watts Cemetery Chapel | |
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General information | |
Architectural style | Gothic Revival |
Town or city | Compton, Surrey |
Country | England |
Coordinates | 51°13′04″N0°37′56″W / 51.21775°N 0.6321°W |
Construction started | 1896 |
Completed | 1898 |
Client | Watts Gallery |
Design and construction | |
Architect(s) | Mary Fraser-Tytler |
Listed Building – Grade I | |
Official name | Watts Memorial Chapel |
Designated | 14 June 1967 |
Reference no. | 1029541 |
The Watts Cemetery Chapel or Watts Mortuary Chapel is a chapel in a Modern Style (British Art Nouveau style) version of Celtic Revival in the village cemetery of Compton in Surrey. The designer was Mary Fraser-Tytler, an artist resident in the village, who married the painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts. While the overall architectural structure is loosely Romanesque Revival, the lavish decoration in terracotta relief carving and paintings is Celtic Revival, 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". [1]
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". [2] It is a Grade I listed building. [3]
When Compton Parish Council created a new cemetery, local resident artist Mary Fraser-Tytler, the wife of Victorian era painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts, offered to design and build a new mortuary chapel. The Wattses had recently build a house, "Limnerslease", a few hundred yards away, now part of the Watts Gallery. Tytler was a follower of the Home Arts and Industries Association, set up by Earl Brownlow in 1885 to encourage handicrafts among the lower classes, and the chapel was the Wattses' contribution to this characteristically Victorian preoccupation with social improvement through creative enlightenment. [1]
A group of local amateurs and enthusiasts, many of whom later went on with Mary Fraser-Tytler to found the Compton Potters' Arts Guild, constructed the chapel from 1896 to 1898; virtually every village resident was involved. The ground plan is essentially circular; from the outside the building has the look of a Roman Italianate chapel. Local villagers were invited to decorate the chapel under Mary's guidance, resulting in an interior that fuses art nouveau and Celtic influences, combined with Mary's own original style. [4] Each member of Fraser-Tytler's evening class, led by Louis Deuchars, had a separate job, with 74 Compton villagers taking part. G. F. Watts paid for the project and also painted a version of The All-Pervading for the altar only three months before he died.
The graves display sayings influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, including "The Morning Stars Sang Together" and, inside the chapel, "Their hope is full of immortality but the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God." [5]
Both Wattses have memorials in the "cloister" a few yards from the chapel, and a number of the memorials throughout the small cemetery use unglazed terracotta, even from dates after the Compton Pottery closed in the 1950s. Members of the Huxley family, including Julia Huxley [6] and her sons Aldous Huxley and Julian Huxley are buried within the cemetery.
The chapel is open Monday to Friday: 8am – 5pm, Saturday to Sunday and bank holidays: 10am – 5:30pm and is managed by the nearby Watts Gallery, celebrating the architect and her husband. There is no charge. [7]
The Celtic Revival is a variety of movements and trends in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries that see a renewed interest in aspects of Celtic culture. Artists and writers drew on the traditions of Gaelic literature, Welsh-language literature, and 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, "Æ" 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 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.
Postman's Park is a public garden in central London, a short distance north of St Paul's Cathedral. Bordered by Little Britain, Aldersgate Street, St. Martin's Le Grand, King Edward Street, and the site of the former headquarters of the General Post Office (GPO), it is one of the largest open spaces in the City of London.
St Nicholas Church is a Church of England parish church in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, England.
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.
Louis Reid Deuchars (1870–1927) was a Scottish artist and sculptor.
Henry Woodyer (1816–1896) was an English architect, a pupil of William Butterfield and a disciple of A. W. N. Pugin and the Ecclesiologists.
Sir Walter John Tapper was an English architect known for his work in the Gothic Revival style and a number of church buildings. He worked with some leading ecclesiastical architects of his day and was President of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Tapper was appointed Surveyor of the Fabric of Westminster Abbey and acted as consulting architect to York Minster and Manchester Cathedral. On his death in 1935 his son Michael Tapper completed some of his works.
The Compton Potters' Arts Guild was an art pottery, founded by and based at the Surrey home of Scottish artist, Mary Fraser Tytler.
Charles Harrison Townsend was an English architect. He was born in Birkenhead, educated at Birkenhead School and articled to the Liverpool architect Walter Scott in 1870. He moved to London with his family in 1880 and entered partnership with the London architect Thomas Lewis Banks in 1884. Townsend became a member of the Art Workers' Guild in 1888 and in the same year was elected a Fellow of the more conservative Royal Institute of British Architects. He remained an active member of both organisations throughout his career and was elected Master of the Art Workers' Guild in 1903. He is important Modern Style architect whose favourite motif was the tree.
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.
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The Anglican Bath Abbey Cemetery, officially dedicated as the Cemetery of St Peter and St Paul, was laid out by noted cemetery designer and landscape architect John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843) between 1843 and 1844 on a picturesque hillside site overlooking Bath, Somerset, England.
Trinity Congregational Church, later known as Union Chapel, is a former place of worship for Congregationalists and Independent Christians in Arundel, an ancient town in the Arun district of West Sussex, England. Protestant Nonconformism has always been strong in the town, and the chapel's founding congregation emerged in the 1780s. After worshipping elsewhere in the town, they founded the present building in the 1830s and remained for many years. Former pastors included the poet George MacDonald. Robert Abraham's distinctive neo-Norman/Romanesque Revival building was converted into a market in the 1980s and has been renamed Nineveh House. The church is a Grade II Listed building.
The Lancaster Cemetery Chapels are the three chapels, each built to serve a different denomination, in the main cemetery of Lancaster, England. The chapels stand around a central point at the highest part of the cemetery. They were all built in 1854–55, and were designed by the local architect E. G. Paley. The chapel to the west of the central point served the Anglicans, that to the east the Non-conformists, and the chapel to the north was for Roman Catholics.
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Romanesque Revival, Norman Revival or Neo-Norman styles of building in the United Kingdom were inspired by the Romanesque architecture of the 11th and 12th centuries AD.
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Horsley Towers, East Horsley, Surrey, England is a country house dating from the 19th century. The house was designed by Charles Barry for the banker William Currie. The East Horsley estate was later sold to William King-Noel, 1st Earl of Lovelace who undertook two major expansions of the house to his own designs. Lovelace lived at the Towers with his wife, Ada, daughter of Lord Byron, a pioneering mathematician, friend of Charles Babbage and described as among the first computer programmers. In 1919, the Towers was purchased by Thomas Sopwith, the aviator and businessman, who named his plane, the Hawker Horsley, after his home. Now a hotel, wedding and conference venue set in parkland with a total area of about 50 acres, Horsley Towers is a Grade II* listed building.