▪ The Compton Pottery was founded by Mary Seton Watts (1848-1938), the second wife of the Victorian painter George Frederic Watts. Together they opened the Watts Gallery in the Surrey village of Compton in 1904, designed in the Arts & Crafts style as a “simple and rural type of building”.
▪ Seton Watts was a talented artist and the founder of the Compton Pottery Arts Guild, selling terracotta garden pots, sundials and birdbaths. This grew out of evening ‘terracotta classes’ that she held at her home, Linnerslease, run for villagers who were mostly unemployed agricultural workers.
▪ Seton Watts’ Arts & Crafts masterpiece, the circular Grade I-listed Watts Chapel – still a mortuary chapel – was described recently as “Byzantium baked in Surrey”. It was built by local people of bright red brick using decorative tiles made of local clay created by her students to adorn the interior and exterior.