Sculpting a Professional Identity: Mary Seton Watts as Designer, Ceramicist and Suffragist 
by Dr Lucy Ella Rose

While her world-famous husband George Frederic Watts is better known as an artist and sculptor, Arts and Crafts pioneer Mary Seton Watts (1849-1938) was a trained modeller, ceramicist and Liberty’s designer, who established a commercial pottery with an international reputation. This talk traces the development of Mary Watts’s professional identity through an exploration of her sculptural works: terracotta figures including saints and her Mother and Child statue; memorials such as her bronze relief  ‘Death Triptych’; her gesso ceiling and mortuary chapel wall designs; and the garden ornaments produced by her successful Compton Pottery. Sculpting, in various forms, became Mary’s forte and legacy. It was a language through which she celebrated cultural diversity and maternal power, exploring contemporary ideas about spirituality and suffragism. This talk thus illustrates how Watts’s work challenged prevailing ideas of women and women’s work in Victorian-Edwardian society.

Dr Lucy Ella Rose is Lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of Surrey, with a special interest in visual culture and feminisms. Her first book Suffragist Artists in Partnership: Gender, Word and Image (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) focuses on nineteenth-century marital creative partnerships Mary and George Watts, and Evelyn and William De Morgan. Rose is currently writing her second book on sisters and sisterhood at the fin-de-siècle, focused on a network of New Women authors, artists and activists.