Veronica Franklin Gould
Archibald Knox and Mary Seton Watts:
‘Modern Celtic Art’ Garden Pottery
210 x 150 mm, 48 pp, 40 ills, ISBN 0 9515811 4 7
Price: £5.50, plus 80p postage
An illustrated handbook to the terracotta garden pottery of Archibald Knox and Mary Seton Watts that decorated Arts and Crafts gardens in Britain and America. Jardinières, sundials, fountains and garden seats ornamented with symbolic Celtic Revival and Art Nouveau motifs, were produced for Liberty & Co by Carter & Co, and for the Potters’ Arts Guild in Surrey and Inverness-shire. Liberty’s announced in 1904, ‘Never before, in this country at least, has the Garden Pot been treated as an item, per se, of decorative skill’.
Veronica Franklin Gould
Watts Chapel: An Arts & Crafts Memorial
210 x 150 mm, 50 pp, 40 ills, ISBN 0 9515811 1 2
Price: £5.95, plus 80p postage
Watts Chapel at Compton, Surrey, is one of the most remarkable Art Nouveau buildings in Britain. Designed on Ruskinian principles by the craftswoman Mary Seton Watts, wife of the Victorian artist G.F. Watts, its profuse terracotta symbolism interwoven within Celtic knotwork evokes the art of ancient civilisations worldwide. The exuberant interior is ablaze with jewel-like polychrome gesso decoration. Comparing a symbol to a magic key, Mary Watts observed that on the one hand it was just a piece of quaintly wrought iron or modelled clay, on the other, it unlocked a door into a world of enchantment.
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