Watts Gallery

I visited the beautiful, if a little wet, Watts Gallery just outside Guildford last week. Set in the rolling green Surrey countryside, this gallery is the realised dream of artist G.F. Watts and his wife Mary Seton Watts.

Watts' career spanned a generation,he constantly redefined and recreated his work, seeking new methods and styles of expression and representation. Mary on the other hand epitomised the arts and crafts movement making it her mission to teach local people the art of terracotta sculpting to create a beautiful chapel just down the road from the gallery.

A shrine to the work of Watts, but so much more than that too, the gallery is a hidden gem; pot plants in teapots?! If that doesn't make for an excellent day out, I don't know what does!

Not the worst place you could be sent to work an extra shift

Today I was lent out from Helmshore to help out at another Museum. Originally I had said no. "It's at Gawthorpe?" said Louise, my boss, and so I was sold. I love Gawthorpe. The land in this corner of Padiham, in Lancashire, has need owned by the Shuttleworth family since the 14th century. In the 1600s Gawthorpe meaning 'place of the cuckoo' was built as a home for the family. It remained empty for a long time when, in the 1850s, famous architect Sir Charles Barry, was hired to renovate the hall. It's most recent owner, Miss Rachel Kay-Shuttleworth, decked it out in all the finest arts and crafts furniture and fabric she could. Hence it is full to the brim with Crane and Pugin designs and a hoard of National Portrait Gallery paintings to boot. It didn't really feel like a day a work, all that tea and chats with Gary and Mary!

Socialism

Walter Crane is best know for his contribution to children's story books. Using a range of imagery borrowed from classical sources and Medieval iconography, Crane changed the way that children learnt to read with his visual approach to learning.

Today I went to the People's History Museum in Manchester and saw quite a different side to Crane's work. This shrine to socialism delivers a history of the development and rise of the labour party from colonialism through Socialism and Communism. Very much on the side of the working class, the museum's approach is to offer an insight into the hard fight for the vote that the new industrial north went through; beginning with the 1819 Peterloo massacre where 18 ordinary workers lost their lives in a peaceful protest turned ugly, and ending with the new labour governments installation in 1945.

Crane was a supporter of Socialism, of people owing the means of production between them. This poster, typical of his work, shows the people overruling the sly serpent capitalism. It seems that Crane, rather like the museum, is very vague about who 'they' are. The poor? The workforce? An underclass? Who is it that only has 'their chains to lose' as Marx put it, under a socialist regime?

For Crane, he believed that artists would prosper under Socialism and had a very idealistic view of the whole thing, shaped it seems by his work and friendship with William Morris. Maybe he thought he could sell more books if his art was liberated from the capitalist monster?!

I also very much liked the caricature poster of Scots coming and taking jobs off English workers. Some things never change...