Tag: art nouveau

Jacques Sultana

The Artwork of Jacques Sultana

Born to a judge and his wife at a Breton village in 1938, Jacques Sultana was a French contemporary, post-war painter, graphic artist and designer who worked during his career in a combination of Art Nouveau and Symbolist styles. He was a prolific painter and produced a large number of photo-realistic canvases throughout his career depicting both clothed and nude male figures.

Expelled from the family home at the age of twenty-two due to his homosexuality, Sultana decided in 1963 to relocate to Paris where he found residence in the 16th arrondissement. During the 1970’s, Sultana created a remarkable series of graphite drawings centering on male nudes and employing surrealist or psychedelic motifs. Of these, his 1975 graphite on paper “L’Oiseau Rare” is considered one the best in the series.

After a period as an art teacher, Jacques Sultana began working in 1978 as a graphic designer and illustrator. He created fashion trade advertisements for several clients, among which was Eminence, a French manufacturer of men’s swimsuits and underwear. Sultana also created illustrations for the distiller Pernod and automobile manufacturer Renault as well as the French Ministry of the Navy for which he illustrated all the service’s military outfits. 

Beginning in 1994 until his death, Sultana devoted himself entirely to painting, most often male nudes in a hyper-realistic and often homoerotic style. He died at the age of seventy-four on the twenty-fourth of July in 2012 at his longtime 16th arrondissement home in Paris. 

A retrospective of Jacques Sultana’s work, entitled “Jacques Sultana, Pentre Hyper-Réaliste”, was held in March to April of 2022 at Paris’s Galerie du Passage in coordination with the publication of an art book of the same name. Sultana’s work can be found in many private collections including the collections of Pierre Passebon and Jean-Paul Gaultier. 

Notes: There is a dearth of biographical information on Jacques Sultana’s life as well as details on his paintings. If anyone has more information, please share it. I am particularly interested in the time he spent in Paris and the titles of his work. 

Top Insert Image: Jacques Sultana, “La Pantalon Rouge”, 2001, Oil and Acrylic on Masonite, 63 x 38.5 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Jacques Sultana, “Tendresse”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 55 x 46 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Jacques Sultana, “Marche de Soho”, 1997, Oil on Canvas, 64 x 45 cm, Private Collection

Jan Toorop

The Art of Johannes (Jan) Toorop

Born in the Purworejo Regency of the southern Central Java province of the Dutch East Indies in December of 1858, Jan (Jean) Theodorus Toorop was a Dutch-Indonesian painter who influenced the development of Dutch modern art at the beginning of the twentieth century. Gifted and sensitive to new ideas, he originally was influenced by Amsterdam Impressionism and later worked in the Symbolist, Art Nouveau, and Pointillist styles. 

The third of five children born to civil servant Christoffel Theodorus Toorop and Maria Magdalena Cooke, Johannes “Jan” Toorop lived on the island of Bangka, an important mining center in Asia, until he was nine years old. He received his initial education in the city of Batavia, now Jakarta, on the island of Java. In 1869, Toorop traveled to the Netherlands where he continued his education in Delft and Amsterdam. Beginning in 1880, he entered a two-year course of art education with studies under Impressionist painter August Allebé at Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie, home to the Amsterdam Impressionist movement.  

In 1883, Toorop enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and became an active member of the avant-garde with travels to Paris and London. He remained in Brussels until 1886, during which time he befriended and shared a studio with Belgian painter William Degouve de Nuncques who became known for his symbolist nocturnal landscapes. In 1883, Toorop joined L’Ensor, an association of artists  opposed to conservative tendencies in art. In the following year, he became a member of Les XX (Les Vingts), the successor group to L’Ensor that centered its theories on the integration of decorative and major arts. 

In 1884, Jan Toorop exhibited his work with the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants in Paris; his first solo exhibition was held in Paris in 1885. He traveled on several occasions to England where he became acquainted with the Pre-Raphaelites and such artists as James Whistler and William Morris. During the mid-1880s, Toorop created work in a variety of styles including Realism, Impressionism, and both Neo and Post-Impressionism. 

After his marriage in 1886 to Annie Hall, the daughter of a wealthy, landed English family and a student of music and the French language, Toorop divided his painting between lodgings in England, Brussels, The Hague, and later the Dutch seaside resort town of Katwijk aan Zee. It was in this period that he developed his own personal style of Symbolism: curvilinear designs with stylized gracile figures and dynamic lines based on motifs from the Javanese culture. In 1892, Toorop exhibited these works at the Salon de la Rose + Croix in Paris and at The Hague’s Circle for the Arts, of which he was a founding member. 

Jan Toorop became influenced in the mid 1890s by the Art Nouveau movement, known in the Netherlands as Noul Stil (New Style) or Nieuwe Kunst (New Art), and created several commercial poster and advertisement designs in this style. After exhibitions in Copenhagen, Dresden and Munich in 1898. he began an extended period of residence at a small marketplace house located in the seaside town of Domburg situated on the northwest coast of the Dutch province of Zeeland. Among Toorop’s many associates at Domburg were such artists as Piet Mondrian, one of the founders of the De Stijl art movement, and Dutch seascape painter Marinus Zwart.

Toorop converted to Roman Catholicism in 1905 and shortly afterward changed his name to Johannes and divorced his wife. In addition to his book illustrations and poster works, he began to produce religious works, including stained glass designs in a more geometrical linear style. After several years of residence at the Dutch city of Nijmegen, Toorop relocated in 1916 to The Hague. Beginning in 1917, he suffered from a partial paralysis that increasingly affected his later production, a series of works inspired by both religion and mysticism. 

Considered to be the most avant-garde artist in the Netherlands at the turn of the twentieth-century, Johannes (Jan) Toorop died at the age of sixty-nine in The Hague at the beginning of March in 1928. His works are in many private collections and such public collections as the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterio and the Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle, both in the Netherlands. 

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Jan Toorop”, circa 1920-1923, Vintage Photograph, Getty Images

Second Insert Image: Jan Toorop, “Delftsche Sloalie”, 1894, Lithograph, Illustration for Delft Salad Oil Advertisement, Limegreen and Black over Pink Ink on Paper, 86 x 56 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Jan Toorop, “Madonna and Child”, 1924, Pencil and Colored Crayons on Paper, 26.5 x 21 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Jan Toorop, “Self Portrait”, 1915, Black Chalk on Paper, 23.3 x 20 cm, Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Valdemar Andersen

The Artwork of Valdemar Andersen

Born at Copenhagen in February of 1875, Valdemar Anderson was a Danish illustrator, painter, graphic and decorative artist. The son of a working-class family, he began an apprenticeship in painting under C. C. Møllmann. Andersen continued his education at the Copenhagen Technical School where he studied under naturalist illustrator Henrik Grønvold. In the autumn of 1894, he attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts for one semester. 

As an illustrator, Andersen was influenced early in his career by Skønvirke, an aesthetic art movement that combined elements of the German Jugendstil, French Art Nouveau and English Arts and Crafts with the Nordic National Romanticism. He began his career by drawing portraits for a stereotype printing firm that produced work for provincial newspapers. In 1902, Andersen joined the graphic department of “Klokken”, a local magazine for which he created its daily poster.

Recognized for the quality of his work, Valdemar Andersen began to receive private commissions, the first of which was from Ernst Bojesen, the co-director of Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag, the oldest and largest publishing company in Denmark. Andersen illustrated numerous books and also created book covers. He created illustrations for the 1905 and 1906 editions of Danish author Carit Etlar’s novels and, between 1906 and 1908, illustrated an edition of Finnish author and historian Zacharias Topelius’s “Feltlgens Historier (Field Doctor’s Stories)”.

As a decorative artist, Andersen collaborated with Danish architect and Academy professor Anton Rosen on such projects as Copenhagen’s 1908 Metropol Building; the murals for the Danish National Exhibition of 1909 in Aahus; and the 1910 vestibule of the Palace Hotel at Copenhagen’s City Hall Square. Andersen created decorative works for many of architect Ejnar Pacness’s public buildings in Jutland, among which was the 1912 Administration Building for the Aalborg Municipality. 

The murals Valdemar Andersen created for the 1909 international exhibition in Aahus led to his mural commissions for the 1914 Malmö-Baltic Exhibition and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco. He designed murals for many private homes, restaurants, and business offices including the City Hall Square headquarters for “Politiken”, the leading Danish daily broadsheet newspaper.

Andersen had the first showing of his paintings at the 1906 Spring Exhibition at Charlottenborg in which he presented his portrait of his life-long friend, Danish author and painter Johannes Vilhelm Jensen. This portrait, highlighted with gouache and pencil, was also exhibited in 1906 at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. Other portraits done by Andersen include those of author and journalist Henrik Cavling, German missionary Ludvig Kraft, novelist Peter Nansen and stage director Henri Nathansen.

Valdemar Andersen presented his paintings at Charlottenborg’s spring exhibition in 1908 as well as its 1914 spring and autumn shows. In 1912, he and fellow artist Harald Moltke had a successful show in one of Copenhagen’s many exhibition halls. Andersen later received a commission from Hafnia, the first life insurance company in Denmark, for five paintings depicting accidents for which insurance might provide some relief. 

Andersen is primarily known today for developing the modern Danish poster design. Between 1906 and 1907, he shifted his poster design to a lighter graphic style. Emphasis was placed on the white surface, a limited range of clear colors and a sparse typeface of the characteristic script that became his trademark. Over the years Andersen was a leading poster artist for many companies and organizations such as Carlsberg, Asta Lampen, Trivoli Gardens, Danish Airlines, Fisker & Nielsen and the Copenhagen Zoo. He was also responsible for many of the designs on Danish stamps and banknotes of the early twentieth-century. 

Valdemar Andersen died stricken by leukemia in Copenhagen in July of 1928 at the age of fifty-three. His son, Ib Andersen, was trained as an architect. However, he established his career as a graphic designer who created aggressively-designed posters strongly influenced by Cubism and the Bauhaus School.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Valdemar Andersen”, Date Unknown, Vintage Photo, Det Kongelige Bibliotek

Second Insert Image: Valdemar Andersen, “Journalistforbundets Rundskuedag (Journalist Association Circular Ski Day”, 1911, Lithograph, 64.2 x 88.8 cm, Publisher Andreasen & Lochmann Ltd

Third Insert Image: Valdemar Andersen, Lithograph, Palle RosenKrantz’s crime novel “Judge Amtsdommer Sterner”, 1906, Publisher Gyldendalin Boghandel Nordisk

Bottom Insert Image: Valdemar Andersen, “The International Air Traffic Exhibition”, 1927, Lithograph, 84 x 62 cm, Publisher Christian Cato, Copenhagen

Georges Noël

The Artwork of Georges Noël

Born in December of 1924 in Béziers, one of the oldest cities in France, Georges Noël was a French painter. His work was greatly influenced by two French avant-garde art movements: Nouveau Réalisme, founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany and painters Raymond Hains and Yves Klein which made extensive use of collage and assemblage, and French Art Informel, an approach to abstraction in the !940s and 1950s that emphasized improvisation and highly gestural techniques. 

Raised in the Castellón city of Pau, Georges Noël initially was an engineering student before his 1939 to 1945 studies of sculpture and painting. After his graduation, he worked for nine years as a draftsman and designer with the aeronautical firm Turboméca, a manufacturer of gas turbine turboshaft engines. In 1956, Noël relocated to Paris where, deeply impressed by the paintings of artists such as Jean Dubuffet and Paul Klee, he devoted his energies to painting. 

Noël’s painting was associated with the French and Italian Informel movement. He was an admirer of the work by Lucio Fontana, an Argentine-Italian painter best known for his tagli, slashed, mostly monochromatic canvases. Noël was also friends with Nouveau Réalisme artists Raymond Hains, Jacques de la Villéglé and François Dufréne. He achieved recognition and commercial success through his representation with noted art dealer Paul Facchetti. Noël’s first solo exhibition was at the Facchetti gallery in 1960; he regularly exhibited there from 1957 to 1968. 

During his stay in Paris, Georges Noël began to use paper laid down on canvas or torn and collaged newspaper as partial foundations for his painting. For his impasto, material paintings, he developed a mixture of powdery pigments, sand and polyvinyl glue which he layered onto canvas. In a gestural-automatic manner, Noël scratched symbolic signs or script into the partly hardened layer of paint to form the images he termed ‘Palimpseste’. With this term, he referred to the early stage of writing done by many cultures which involved the erasing and re-engraving of writen elements on stone or clay tablets. Noël’s wide vocabulary of signs showed his interest in the magic, symbolism and mystery of prehistoric, Mycenaean-Archaic and indigenous cultures.

In 1963 at a medieval abbey in Rowen, Noël met Margit Rowell who was training to be a medievalist. She would become his wife, life-time companion, and a  veteran art historian and curator with key positions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York. Feeling restless and seeking a change in venue and style, Noël moved with Rowell to New York City in 1968. After research and experimentation, he found the visual, geometric language he wanted to express in his work. Noël was represented by and exhibited with two major New York galleries from 1969 to his return to France: the internationally-based Pace Gallery and the renowned Arnold Herstand Gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street.

In 1982, Georges Noël and Rowell returned to France where he had a major exhibition at the Abbaye de Senanque in Provence, which was followed in 1985 by a retrospective at the Centre National des Arts Plastiques in Paris. Noël’s late stylistic development showed a unification of the gestural painting of his early work and the more structural compositions of his New York period. From 1985 forward, he exhibited regularly in Italy, Germany, and Japan. Noël’s work is currently represented for France by the Galerie Christophe Gaillard.

Through all the unusual diversity of styles during his fifty-year career, Georges Noël’s textured canvases and graphic interventions remained constant. His works on paper show the same spontaneous scripts and signs, either on wash, collaged or built-up surfaces. Considered one of the most important representatives of the French Informel movement, Georges Noël passed away in Paris in 2010 at the age of eighty-six. 

Noël’s work is found in private collections and institutions throughout the world, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bibliothèque National and the F.N.A.C. in Paris, and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, among others. 

Notes: Georges Noël’s paintings, drawings and publications can be found at his website located at: https://www.georgesnoel.org

An informative interview between writer and curator Tenzing Barshee and Margit Rowell on Georges Noël’s life and work process can be found at the Mousse Magazine website located at: https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/theres-texture-without-touching-georges-noel/

Second Insert Image: Georges Noël, “Ohne Titel”, 1987, Mixed Media on Canvas, 106.5 x 75 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Georges Noël, “Palimpseste, Sones de Pensée”, 1962, Oil and Sand on Canvas, 116.5 x 89 cm, Private Collection

Charles de Sousy Ricketts

The Artwork of Charles de Sousy Ricketts

Born in Geneva in October of 1866, Charles de Sousy Ricketts was a versatile British illustrator, author and printer known for his work as a book designer, typographer, and designer of theatrical sets and costume. He was the only son of Charles Robert Ricketts, a Royal Navy veteran and amateur painter, and Héléne Cornélie de Sousy, daughter of the Marquis de Sousy. Ricketts spent his formative years mainly in France and received his education through his governesses. 

After the death of his mother in 1880, Charles Ricketts relocated with his father to London where, considered too frail for school, he became largely self-educated through reading and visiting museums. In 1882, Ricketts entered the City and Guilds of London Art School where he apprenticed to wood-engraver Charles Roberts. Later that year, his father died and he became dependent on the modest support of his paternal grandfather. On his sixteenth birthday, he met his lifelong partner Charles Haslewood Shannon, a fellow student three years his senior who was studying painting and lithography. The two men lived together in both a personal and professional partnership until Ricketts’s death.

After finishing their studies, Ricketts became a commercial and magazine illustrator; Shannon took a teaching post at London’s newly founded Croyton School of Art. In 1888, Ricketts took possession of painter James Whistler’s former house, The Vale, in Chelsea which soon became a gathering place of contemporary artists. Starting in 1889 until its final issue in 1897, Ricketts and Shannon produced “The Dial”, a journal of poetry, prose, and English Pre-Raphaelite and French Symbolist illustrations. This portfolio became a major publication of the Aesthetic Movement. 

Charles Ricketts, in collaboration with Shannon, illustrated their close friend Oscar Wilde’s 1891 ”A House of Pomegranates” and the 1894 “The Sphinx”. Ricketts and Shannon worked together on the type and illustrations for editions of “Daphnis and Chloe” in 1893 and “Hero and Leander” in 1894. After initially running a small press, they founded London’s Vale Press in 1896 which published more than seventy-five books including a thirty-nine volume edition of Shakespeare’s work. Ricketts designed illustrations as wells fonts, initials, and borders specific to Vale Press. He also executed woodcut illustrations of Art Nouveau design and androgynous figures for their publications. After a 1904 fire at their printer Ballantyne Press destroyed their engraving woodcuts, Ricketts and Shannon made the decision to abandon publishing; Ricketts destroyed all the typefaces he had designed for Vale Press.

Beginning in the early 1900s, Ricketts placed his focus on painting and sculpture. He had a deep knowledge of earlier painters and was particularly influenced by the works of the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau and the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix. Among Ricketts’s many paintings are the 1904 “Betrayal of Christ”, the 1911 “The Death of Don Juan”, “Bacchus in India” painted in 1913, “Jepthah’s Daughter” painted in 1924, and the 1915 “Montezuma”, now at the Manchester Art Gallery. Over the course of his career, Ricketts produced about twenty sculptures among which are “Silence”, a memorial to his friend Oscar Wilde, and two bronze works entitled “Paolo and Francesca” and “Orpheus and Eurydice”.

From 1906 to his death, Charles Ricketts was a celebrated theatrical set and costume designer. His first commission was for a private production of s double billing of Oscar Wilde’s plays, “Salome” and “A Florentine Tragedy”, at King’s Hall in Covent Garden. In 1907, he designed costumes and stage sets for Aeschylus’s “The Persians” also performed at King’s Hall. During the early 1900s, Ricketts designed both costume and sets for many commercial theater productions including Hugo Hofmannsthal’s “Electra” in 1908, “King Lear” at the Haymarket in 1909, and two of Bernard Shaw’s plays, “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets” in 1910 and “Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress” in 1918.

After World War One, Ricketts continued his theatrical design with Shaw’s “Saint Joan” at the New Theater in 1924, “Henry VIII” at the Empire Theater in 1925 and “Macbeth” at the Princess Theater in 1926. He also designed costumes and sets  for the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company’s 1926 production of “The Mikado” at the Savoy Theater. Most of Ricketts’s designs for “The Mikado” were retained by other designers of the company for more than fifty years. Ricketts final theater designs were for the 1931 production of Ferdinand Bruckner’s “Elizabeth of England” preformed at London’s Cambridge Theater and a production of Donald Tovey’s opera “The Bride of Dionysus” staged posthumously in Edinburgh after Ricketts’s death.

As a writer, Charles Ricketts published two monographs on art as well as essays and articles  on a wide range of subjects for publications. Using the pen-name of Jean Paul Raymond, he wrote and designed two collections of short stories published in 1928 and 1933. Under the same pen-name, Ricketts wrote the 1932 “Recollections of Oscar Wilde”, an extremely personal memoir that was published after Ricketts’s death. Ricketts’s last years were were greatly effected by Charles Shannon’s serious fall and resulting permanent brain damage. The strain of the situation with the addition of overwork to finance the household contributed to the decline of Ricketts’s health and ultimately his death.

Charles de Sousy Ricketts died suddenly at age sixty-five from coronary heart disease on the 7th of October in 1931 at the Regent’s Park house. He was cremated and his ashes partly scattered in London’s Richmond Park, and the remainder buried at Arolo, Lake Maggiore in Italy. Charles Shannon outlived him by six years and died in March of 1937.

Note: The New York Public Library’s assistant curator Julie Carlsen, along with Henry W. and Albert A. Berg of the English and American Literature Collection, have written an interesting article on Ricketts and Shannon’s designs for the bindings of Oscar Wilde’s work published by Vale Press. The article can be found at: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2021/10/12/publishers-bindings-oscar-wilde-charles-shannon-charles-ricketts

Top Insert Image: George Charles Beresford, “Charles de Sousy Ricketts”, October 1903, Sepia-Toned Platinotype Print, 15.5 x 10.7 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Charles de Sousy Ricketts, Page from Ricketts’s “The Prado and Its Masterpieces”, 1923, Published by E.P. Dutton and Company, New York, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Charles de Sousy Ricketts, Illustration and Text from Michael Field’s “The Race of Leaves”, 1901, Woodcut, The Ballantyne Press, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: George Charles Beresford, “Charles Haslewood Shannon and Charles de Sousy Ricketts”, October 1903, Modern Print from Original Negative, 11 x 15.7 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Ludwig von Hofmann

Ludwig von Hofmann, “Die Quelle (The Source)”, 1913, Oil on Canvas, Thomas Mann Archives, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich

A member of the avant-garde group “Eleven”, Ludwig von Hofmann was an active participant in the cultural movement “Berlin Succession”. He taught at the art school in Weimar, located in central Germany, and at the Dresden Academy of Arts, where he directed a course in monumental painting. Von Hoffman was a frequent illustrator for the arts and literary magazine “Pan”, which played an important role in the development of the Art Nouveau movement in Germany. 

Working in a combination of Symbolist and Art Nouveau styles, Ludwig von Hofmann’s paintings included antique and biblical themes, and idyllic landscapes inhabited by surreal or mythological creatures. His work aspired to portray beauty in form, using unique and strong color combinations, and often presented a veiled eroticism in its figures.  Von Hofmann’s symbolist work is both decorative and idealized, with verdant forests, blossoming fields, and naked or clothed figures whose skin or flowing garments are lit by the sun. 

In 1903, von Hofmann was appointed a professor at the Weimar Saxon Grand Ducal Art School. He was later named a Professor at the Academy of Arts in Dresden in 1916, remaining there until 1931. In his later years, von Hofmann predominately worked in the Art Nouveau style, producing engravings and illustrations, and designing libraries, residential rooms and theaters. 

The production of Ludwig von Hofmann’s work slowed in the 1930s, with some of his work labeled “degenerate art’ by the National Socialist Party in 1937. He retired to the town of Pillnitz, a section of east Dresden, where he died in August of 1945. 

Top Insert Image: Ludwig von Hofmann, “Badende am Schwarzen Felsein ( Bathers on the Black Rock)”, 1930, Oil on Canvas

Bottom Insert Image: Ludwig von Hofmann, “Men, Boys and Horses in a Landscape”, circa 1910, Pastel on Paper

Mary Fraser Tytler-Watts

Mary Fraser Tytler-Watts, The Watts Mortuary Chapel, Compton, Surrey, England

Born in November of 1849 in India, Mary Seton Fraser Tytler was a Symbolist craftswoman, designer, and social reformer. She spent her early years in Scotland, being raised by her grandparents, before moving to England in the 1860s. In 1870 Tytler studied at the South Kensington School of Art, and later studied sculpture at the Slade School of Art in 1872 and 1873. Initially a portrait painter, she associated with the Freshwater art community on the Isle of Wight, becoming friends with Julia Margaret Cameron, a British photographer known for her soft-focus portraits of Victorian men.

Mary Tytler met painter George Frederic Watts, who was thirty-three years her senior, and married him in November of 1886 in Epsom, Surrey. After her marriage, Mary Watts worked in the fields of Celtic and Art Nouveau, producing pottery, bas-reliefs, metalwork, and textiles. Watts exhibited her work in The Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago, Illinois. Through the Home Arts and Industries Association, she created employment in the rural communities; she also trained workers in clay modeling, which led to the establishment of the Compton Potters’ Guild in 1899.

Mary Watts designed, built, and maintained the Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton from 1895 to 1904. It is a chapel in an Art Nouveau version of the Celtic Revival style. The main structure is inspired by the 11th and 12th-century Romanesque architecture; but the terracotta relief carving and painting is Celtic Revival. Virtually every village resident was involved in the chapel’s construction, with local villagers, under Watt’s guidance decorating the interior with a fusion of art nouveau and Celtic influences. George Watts, Mary’s husband, paid for the entire project and painted the allegorical “The All-Prevading” for the altar just three months before he died in July of 1904. 

Mary Watts strongly supported the revival of the Celtic style, the indigenous artistic expression of Scotland and Ireland. In 1899, she began designing rugs in this style for the carpet company Alexander Morton & Company, which was Liberty & Company’s, the luxury department store, main producer of fabrics. Watts pioneered the department store’s Celtic style with designs for the Celtic Revival textiles, carpets, book-bindings, and metal work.

Mary Watts was President of the Godalming and District National Union of Women’s Suffrage Society and convened at least one women’s suffrage meeting in Compton, Surrey. A firm believer that everyone should have a craft with which they could express themselves, Mary Watts died at Limnerslease, her home in Compton, on the sixth of September in 1938. Her remains are buried in the Watts Mortuary Chapel.

Note: The Watts Mortuary Chapel at Compton, Surrey, is managed by the nearby Watts Gallery, dedicated to the paintings and sculptures of George Frederic Watts. The chapel is open Monday to Friday (8AM to 5PM) and Saturday to Sunday (10AM to 5:30PM). There is no entrance charge.

Woodrow Nash

Ceramic Sculptures by Woodrow Nash

Woodrow Nash’s recent sculptural works present the lure and mystery of our past and present reflections. The cut out eyes of his majestic clay figures gaze deep within the historical context of art history as well as carving out new path ways with Nash’s sculptural techniques. The range of colors and textures bring Nash’s life-like beings down to earth to be observed and reflected upon.

His stylized African portraits evoke the 15th century Benin concepts of graceful slender proportions and undulating lines of 18th century Art Nouveau. In his works Nash achieves his goal of intergrating expression, complex symbolism and sophisticated aesthetics to yeild striking embodiments of the human soul and sensuality.

Incorporating various styles and techniques Nash utilizes stoneware, porcelain, earthenware, and terracotta. The sculptures are then fired electronically using a pit firing technique giving the sculptures a “raku” effect; creating an “African Nuveau” trademark that is solely his own. Each sculptural figure is unique and strikes an individual pose of poetic grace and refined detail — each telling their own story.