The hunger for the divine and Mary Watts’s Funerary Chapel
We took a day trip to the glorious Watts Gallery and it was...a lot!
The hunger for the divine and Mary Watts’s Funerary Chapel
On Sunday, my partner announced we going for a day trip. So we packed up the dog, the teen and the husband (me, banished to the back seat with the dog) and went to see the Watts Gallery in Compton,, near Guildford. We took it in turns to sit patiently outside the building with the dog and I caught up with a whole pile of Substack pieces, including Ellie Robins’s gently skeptical but affectionate critique of a wide-ranging list of modern spiritual practices aimed at connecting or reconnecting with some form of the divine - witchcraft, astrology, psychedelics, and folklore. Her posts are always passionate, full-on and thought-provoking and this one was is no exception. Ellie expresses a preference, ultimately, for her own superpower of imagination. I left the commenting equivalent of one raised eyebrow at her take on some of this, though I share a lot of her skepticism. I am, as I once told someone in a hospital, a skeptical sort of witch and so are most of my friends. I believe in the power of vaccines, antibiotics and Hecate, thank you very much, even if I do carry a pack of tarot cards everywhere and lean heavily on the I Ching for advice in the more challenging of circumstances.
Then I went to see the Mary Watts Chapel and I couldn’t help thinking that Ellie and Mary would probably have found a lot in common.
When people list artistic power couples [https://artmejo.com/creative-power-couples/] Mary and G.F. Watts don’t tend to get mentioned. Perhaps it’s because the Pre-Raphaelites have fallen deeply (and perhaps understandably) out of fashion with the middle classes over the last hundred years (Goth-adjacent sub-cultures excepted). Or perhaps it’s the vague aura of refined bourgeois privilege around the Arts and Crafts [https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/arts-and-crafts-an-introduction] movement. Whilst G.F. Watts was a hugely popular artist in his own day, he hasn’t rated a mention in Gombrich’s A-Level mainstay text, History of Art, for some decades. But his wife Mary has rather more of a claim to be celebrated and more and more attention is being paid to both her considerable artistry and her equally considerable business acumen. These days, the Watts Gallery is a testament to the Watts’s achievements in both arenas.
My wife took her turn with the dog and the 16 year old and I went to see the Chapel, a Grade 1 listed building created between 1894 and 1904 and intended as a gift to Compton village’s new cemetery. It was very much Mary’s creation, a synthesising act of art or worship or both. Building it depended on a small army of local collaborators but the design was comprehensively Mary’s a clear reflection of her own deeply felt, if slightly idiosyncratic, Christian faith, and her equally sincere interest in other currents of spirituality and religion. The moulded ceiling of the entrance hall to their nearby home, built in 1891, was also her own design and sweeps across aeons of religious beliefs - Assyrian urmahlullu (lion-centaur beasts guarding important portals) in one square, boddhisattvas in the next. Celtic abstractions and a Tree of Life are neighbours to Brahmans and Egyptian deities. Hers was a powerfully syncretising imagination and the funeral chapel she created reflects this, its Victorian High Anglicanism filtered through an exotic blaze of dark colours and angelic forces.
From a distance, set back in the modest country cemetery, the chapel seems small, like a scale model of a lofty basilica. On the outside, it’s red brick, with high, deep set, Romanesque arches. The pillars and doorways are lined with beautifully formed decorative ceramic mouldings reflecting Mary Watt’s attraction to Celtic forms and Celtic Christianity. She was consciously echoing the work of the monks, craftsmen and scribes of early medieval times whose work saved those designs, “trying to revive in some degree that living quality which was in all decoration when pattern had meaning“.
That quote is from the short book Mary also wrote explaining the complex symbolism of the Chapel - The Word In The Pattern (1905). The key unifying symbol for the chapel, she reveals, is the equal armed cross set in circle. “The Circle of Eternity with the Cross of Faith running through it is from pre-historic times,” she tells us. She relates it to the later Christian revelation but gives it a universalist, mythic spin - “the inarticulate cry of the human, seeking then and now and always a return to the divine Father”. The Tree of Life appears in many places and Mary cites its Accadian (Babylonian) origins some three to four thousand years ago. Elsewhere, she uses symbols like labyrinths to illustrate the Way to the Divine. In fact, every element of every decoration holds a specific meaning.
Inside, it feels like stepping into the mystery of the Grail. The inside of the chapel, full of darkness and splendour, is the shape of an inverted goblet. Everywhere you turn, one is faced by new visions of angelic forces and endlessly intertwining knots and labyrinths in rich shades of red, dark green and shadowy gold. The whole interior is a vision of the labyrinth of the Way.
What I’m left thinking is that Mary’s imagination was far too generous and large to be constrained by the ostensible orthodoxy we read in her book, though clues to her wider consciousness keep breaking through. Her chapel is an act of worship and engagement with the immanent that cannot help but burst past the boundaries of her Christianity (hinted at by her reference points from the pagan-flavoured Celtic church). I mean, look at it!
What we do see is a response, from 130 years ago, to Ellie’s concern that the shallow end of modern practice of astrology, tarot and witchcraft fades out before any real engagement with the divine. Whilst I do wonder if (for example) she’s perhaps met the wrong witches , half an hour trawling Witchtok or the endless content creators with freshly minted MFAs pouring out kick-starter tarot decks ought to convince one that she’s got a point. All of this still expresses a hunger for the divine, however tangled up in commoditisation and the quick fix of ‘manifesting’. But in chasing after the new and failing to see the value in what’s under our noses, or cleaving to rigidly to dead old forms, we risk throwing out both divine baby and bathwater. The Watts Chapel shows not just one woman’s vision of a positively mystical alternative but a whole community’s willingness to engage with something larger and more mysterious than themselves.
But most of all, it’s very beautiful. Sometimes, that can be enough.
Another fabulous read. Fascinated and inspired. Thanks for the pictures too. They took my breath away.
I LOVE Mary Watt's chapel in Compton and the little angels around the graves there... and the well! My favourite painting is Hope. I like it that they have no electric light to spoil the paintings inside, and she reformed so many of the gin drinkers giving them work. Thank you so much for reminding me of something very special!