Victorian Culture Author Details and Original Manuscript
Dr Lucy Ella Rose
University of Surrey
/ 07769695551
Feminist Friendships and Partnerships in Nineteenth-Century Artistic and Literary Circles:
Mary and George Watts, George Meredith, and Josephine Butler
Abstract
This interdisciplinary, historicist-feminist paper (combining literary and art historical perspectives as well as an awareness of historical context and an application of recent feminist theory) explores the feminist affiliations of the Victorian artists Mary and George Watts, focusing specifically on their close friendships with the writer and women’s suffrage supporter George Meredith and the women’s rights worker Josephine Butler. The paper introduces the Wattses’ own anti-patriarchal conjugal creative partnership before investigating their relationships with Meredith and Butler through a reading of Mary Watts’s unpublished and hitherto untranscribed diaries (which record their interactions) as well as a discussion of George Watts’s paintings (particularly his portraits of Meredith and Butler in his ‘Hall of Fame’). This paper thus offers an unprecedented insight into the Wattses’ personal and professional relationships as well as their progressive socio-political positions, reclaiming them as early feminists who were part of a wider emergent feminist community. This paper's discussion of the Wattses, Meredith and Butler provides new perspectives on the connections, works and views of these public literary, artistic and feminist figures as well as the ways in which they supported and promoted the women’s rights movement that escalated over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century. It thus offers a fuller understanding of these figures as well as of the rise of early feminism in the Victorian period.
Keywords
Mary Watts; George Watts; Josephine Butler; George Meredith; ‘Hall of Fame’; portrait; diary; suffrage; feminism; art; literature
Wordcounts
8231 (including footnotes); 7052 (excluding footnotes)
Biographical Note
I completed my BA and MA in English Literature at the University of Sussex, before completing my PhD in English Literature (with Art History) at the University of Surrey in January of this year. My interdisciplinary PhD thesis, titled ‘Women in Nineteenth-Century Creative Partnerships: the “Significant Other”’, explores the empowered role of women in nineteenth-century artistic and literary partnerships, and the rise of feminism through women’s newfound professional artistic and literary discourses. As part of my PhD studentship, I worked for three years on the Mary Watts archive at Watts Gallery in Surrey, where I transcribed several of Mary’s diaries for publication, co-curated The Making of Mary Seton Watts exhibition (2013), gave the first of the Curators’ Tours of this exhibition and wrote a chapter of the book published to coincide with it.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the University of Surrey and Watts Gallery for awarding the three-year PhD studentship (their first collaboration) which enabled me to conduct my research, and especially to Mark Bills, Nick Tromans, Gregory Tate and Desna Greenhow. Images of the Wattses’ and their works are reproduced with the kind permission of Watts Gallery.
Feminist Friendships and Partnerships in Nineteenth-Century Artistic and Literary Circles:
Mary and George Watts, George Meredith, and Josephine Butler
- Introduction
Much has been written about the eminent Victorian artist George Frederic Watts (1817-1904), dubbed ‘England’s Michelangelo’ and ‘Britain’s Premier Portrait-Painter’, who produced the world-famous symbolist painting Hope (1886). Yet the life and work of his wife Mary Seton Watts (née Fraser Tytler, 1849-1938), and the couple’s progressive socio-political positions as creative partners and women’s rights supporters, are comparatively critically neglected. Though largely known merely as G. F. Watts’s[1] adoring wife or widow, Mary was a pioneering professional woman painter, ceramicist, designer, illustrator and architect. She designed rugs and pots for Liberty, was a leading light in the Home Arts and Industries Association, and became a famous name in the field of Arts and Crafts. Both Mary and G. F. Watts became Victorian celebrities over the course of their lifetimes, and they established solid reputations in intellectual, aristocratic, artistic and literary circles. They were much admired by their forward-thinking contemporaries, such as the famous novelist, poet and women’s suffrage supporter George Meredith (1828-1909) and the famous social reformer and women’s rights worker Josephine Butler (1828-1906), although the connections between these figures are not widely acknowledged, and these four figures have never before been explored in conjunction as part of an emergent nineteenth-century feminist community.
The Wattses’ close friendships with these early feminists is not only reflected in G. F. Watts’s ‘Hall of Fame’ – a collection of portraits of his most distinguished contemporaries that he bequeathed to the National Portrait Gallery for posterity in 1895 – which features portraits of both George Meredith and Josephine Butler,[2] but is also recorded by Mary Watts’s unpublished – and hitherto untranscribed – diaries (covering 1886-1908), which document their fascinating interactions and discussions. Crucial to the originality of this paper is a discussion of Mary’s diary entries which offer unprecedented insights into her professional and personal relationships with her husband as well as with other leading literary, artistic and feminist figures, especially George Meredith and Josephine Butler. This paper thus offers a fuller understanding of these figures’ relationships, works and views as well as a deeper understanding of the rise of early feminism over the second half of the nineteenth-century, the period in which ‘active feminism took root’.[3]
- Mary and George Watts: An Anti-Patriarchal Conjugal Creative Partnership
Mary Watts was ‘born just at the right time [...] the turn of the middle of the nineteenth century’[4] when women were first offered the opportunity to undertake formal, vocational training in the arts and crafts, upon which she embarked with gusto; she thus carved out a creative career for herself. At age seventeen, Mary attended the new Inverness Art Training School, and subsequently – like many suffragist artists – studied at the progressive unisex Slade School of Fine Art; she was admitted in 1873 (soon after it opened) and was part of the first wave of women to receive formal art training. She also attended the National Art Training School in South Kensington which emphasised design and decorative arts. Mary was part of an Arts and Crafts movement that V. Irene Cockroft argues was ‘a deciding factor’ in women’s campaign for equal citizenship. Along with other pioneering women artists and craftswomen, Mary elevated the developing Arts and Crafts movement – which helped promote the nineteenth-century women’s movement – to ‘mainstream history’.[5] Mary’s lifelong preoccupation with female liberty – which was for her a personal and political issue – is evident in her diaries as well as in her production of mothers, winged women and symbols of freedom in her art and craft.
Mary and G. F. Watts visited each other’s studios before their engagement, when they would discuss art and society. They believed that art could reach all people and transform the lives that it touched, and Mary greatly influenced G. F. Watts’s support of the ‘wider aesthetic mission’[6] of the Arts and Crafts movement that she personally promoted. The Wattses’ prolific correspondence in the lead up to their engagement and marriage (1886-1904) reveals their early relationship – invariably seen to represent patriarchal power relations – to be based on equality. Mary wrote to G. F. Watts, ‘I grow when I am with you’,[7] and he wrote to her, ‘I have come to feel for you the most profound and tender respect’.[8] He assured her that he would not limit her liberty in marriage, writing, ‘the door of your cage shall be wide open and there shall be no wires’,[9] promising her an alternative to the conjugal bondage experienced by many Victorian women. As artists and symbolists as well as early feminists who supported greater female liberation and participation in the arts, the Wattses were partners who shared the same ideals in art and life, and (in G. F. Watts’s words) ‘suit[ed] each other […] absolutely’.[10]
The Wattses’ studio-house (Figure 1) in Compton, Surrey, where they were visited by George Meredith and Josephine Butler, was a vision that was realised and built ‘under Mary’s controlling eye’[11] in 1890-91. Mary transformed the interior itself into a work of art with her highly imaginative symbolic decoration, subverting the traditionally separate artistic/domestic spheres. The Wattses worked alongside each other in opposite studios in this house, which they named ‘Limnerslease’ – ‘limner’ being the Medieval term for ‘artist’ and ‘leasen’ being the Old English word meaning ‘to glean’ – in the hope that there were golden years of creativity to be gleaned from this home. Together they established ‘an ethic of work within the domestic space’[12] they shared, and Mary’s writing reveals how their pleasure resided in ‘a household routine ordered around artistic productivity’.[13] Diary entries such as, ‘I began my work when [G. F. Watts] did this morning […] We had both a hard day of work’[14] pervade her diaries, and Mary records her husband exclaiming, ‘How delightful it is to work together in this way!’[15] Contradicting critics’ suggestions that ‘the constant presence of [Mary’s] husband in the home was somewhat restrictive’,[16] Mary wrote, ‘I am doing what I purposed to do at the beginning of my life with [G. F. Watts] and it makes it the most delightful work I have ever done.’[17] Mary dispelled the prevailing myth that devoted wife and dedicated female artist were mutually exclusive and exemplified how these two competing visions of woman in the nineteenth century could successfully co-exist. The Wattses’ mutually supportive creative partnership subverted prevailing patriarchal assumptions and binaries that defined women in relation to men as inferior creators and subordinate beings.
The Wattses’ anti-patriarchal conjugal creative partnership – a radical approach to marital politics, representing greater gender equality – was consistent with their progressive socio-political views. They had a shared agenda for greater gender equality and female liberation, which they advocated in their literary, visual and social work. In their liberal and progressive views on women, the Wattses can be seen to represent a partnership of ‘like minds’.[18] In The Annals, Mary writes,
In talking the matter [of women’s suffrage] over with [G. F. Watts] – I think seriously for the first time – I found that we were agreed, and that he believed that feminine influence in politics would have a good effect, especially upon social questions. He recognised the justice of the demand, and regarded it as a natural development consequent on the progress of education.[19]
She also recalls G. F. Watts saying, ‘I [...] rather pride myself on being a real Liberal; that is to say, being liberal enough to see and understand that there are and must be many conditions and many opinions’.[20] It is clear from Mary’s diaries that she championed ‘free thought and speech and action’,[21] admired the ‘great liberality of the non-conformist mind’[22] and respected people who desired ‘to know everything that is good & great & large – [and were] dissatisfied with all that is merely conventional orthodox & narrow’[23] – which was undoubtedly why she admired George Meredith and Josephine Butler. The Wattses were also affiliated with early feminism in their close friendships also with other women’s rights supporters such as Walter Crane, John Stuart Mill, Gertrude Jekyll, and William and Evelyn De Morgan. G. F. Watts was pleased that he could give Mary ‘something really good’, telling her, ‘many delightful & great people have been very kind to me & I have made them my friends & now can make them yours’.[24] As his conjugal and creative partner, Mary had access to the leading public figures, novelists, artists and feminists of her day, conversing with creative, forward-thinking people who visited to have their portrait painted; she took advantage of the opportunity to engage in serious discussions about art and society with them and became widely respected in her own right. Mary’s formation or continuation of friendships with women’s rights activists and social reformers, as well as her professional training, creative practices and creative partnership with G. F. Watts, can be seen as suffragist strategies through which she gained and promoted greater female liberation.
Mary was a ‘keen suffragist’[25] who – like George Meredith, who was opposed to the militant tactics of the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union) – believed in evolution rather than revolution, considered feminine influence beneficial to politics, and voting rights for women a natural development of educational reform; she was liberal and progressive rather than radical and avant-garde. Mary refused to support Frederic Leighton’s sister’s anti-suffrage activity,[26] was President of the Godalming and District National Union of Women's Suffrage Society,[27] and even convened at least one suffrage meeting at Compton according to the biography of her friend, neighbour, fellow artist (collaborator on terracotta garden ornaments) and committed suffragist Gertrude Jekyll’.[28] Mary offered her husband’s allegorical painting Faith to be reproduced on the cover of a NUWSS (National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies) journal, showing her support for women’s suffrage organisations. She also supported women’s art organisations: she sent a design to be made by the Guild of Women Binders as a cover for G. F. Watts’s exhibition catalogues in 1898 – a bound volume of which was presented as a gift to Mary after her husband’s death[29] – and she was appointed Honorary President of the Women’s Guild of Arts in 1907.[30] This reveals Mary’s largely-unacknowledged affiliation with women’s groups, support of women’s culture, and active participation in the suffrage movement.
The Wattses influenced each other’s interest in - and support of - women’s suffrage, testifying to the fact that men as well as women actively supported female emancipation and empowerment in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the importance of G. F. Watts’s support for – and influence on – Mary’s progressive stance should not be underestimated. Mary wrote in her 1887 diary, ‘Woke to speak of Politics. [G. F. Watts] asked me if I had always been so liberal. I said I had been liberal but not so much as I had now become […] I told him Christina used to laugh & say “Watts is making Moll a radical”’.[31] While this remark was seemingly said in jest, Mary’s sister’s comment highlights an important development in her position: while Mary was always liberal, she assumed an increasingly progressive socio-political position during her partnership with G. F. Watts – and this was facilitated not only by his (tacit and sometimes active) support but also the public platform she acquired as his partner and as an increasingly successful artist in her own right. While her liberal position has been fleetingly referred to in previous scholarship, her diaries reveal a more radical private self. They reveal Mary’s character, partnership with G. F. Watts and political stance to be much more complex than critics like Mark Bills and Veronica Franklin Gould have previously perceived; the former recently re-presented Mary as a submissive ‘acolyte and servant’[32] to her husband, and the latter’s reclamation of Mary as an ‘unsung heroine of the art nouveau’[33] avoids a detailed discussion of Mary in relation to feminism. This paper argues that Mary was not passive and peripheral but active and influential in her conjugal creative partnership as well as in contemporary gender-related and women-centred debates. Her diaries document her views on socio-political issues – often through a documentation of her discussions with figures like Meredith and Butler – showing how she was influenced by, and contributed to, progressive ideas about gender in the late nineteenth century; they thus reveal her largely unrecognised progressive position in relation to early feminism.
- George Meredith: On Women and Nakedness
George Watts and George Meredith met in the late 1850s, when they undoubtedly bonded over their similar views on art, literature and society, and they came to greatly admire one another. G. F. Watts was eager to paint a portrait of Meredith (Figure 2), who was flattered if bemused by the request; Meredith wrote to a friend, ‘Watts has written a most generous offer to paint my head […] It is distressing, for I could not consent to absorb any of his precious time […] my grizzled mug may be left to vanish.’[34] His fear was that a future public would not know why he appeared in the ‘Hall of Fame’. Nonetheless, Meredith was eventually persuaded to sit for his portrait to be painted by G. F. Watts at his Surrey studio-house, and the Wattses’ neighbours invited Meredith to stay with them so that sittings might be arranged. The art historian Deborah Cherry points out that a feminist politics often informed a painter’s choice of sitter, and (although Cherry only cites women’s paintings of women[35]) G. F. Watts’s progressive socio-political views apparently informed his selection of fellow social reformers and women’s rights supporters – including Meredith and Butler – to sit for portraits, which helped shape their public identities and create a visible feminist community to promote the women’s cause.