Mary Seton Fraser Tytler and Watts Chapel

Last week I had the chance to visit Watts Memorial Chapel in Surrey. Watts Chapel is a tiny Arts and Crafts gem created by Mary Seton Fraser Tytler (1849-1938).

                                        Above: Mary Seton Fraser Tytler with her sisters, Mary is second from right.

Mary was born in India the daughter of Charles Edward Fraser Tytler of Balnain and Aldourie, who worked for the East India Company. She was raised in Scotland at Aldourie Castle, Loch Ness, by her grandparents. In the early 1870's she commenced her art studies at the South Kensington school of art, before going on to the Slade to study sculpture.
Initially, Mary worked as a portrait painter linked with the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) and the Freshwater community on the Isle of White and it was here that she met her husband the painter George Fredrick Watts (1817-1904). After their marriage, the couple made their home in the village of Compton, Surrey.

In 1895 the Parish Council purchased land for a new cemetery on the edge of Compton village. The Watts decided to finance the building of a mortuary chapel for the cemetery and were determined that its creation should involve the community. 

Mary designed, built and maintained the Watts Mortuary Chapel. Villagers, many of whom were unemployed agricultural workers, helped to make the terracotta tiles covering the walls of the chapel.

Mary worked with them at evening classes, which she held in her studio. When the structure and exterior decoration were finished in 1898, the chapel was consecrated. 

Virtually everyone from the local community had become involved in the chapel's construction and then became the founding members of the Compton Potters' Arts Guild. 

Over the next six years, Mary worked on the interior relief work and painting. The work is highly detailed and Mary did much of it herself. The moldings for the interior were created using a base of chicken wire, sacking hemp and rough plaster, which was coated with gesso, a mixture of fine plaster and animal glue, and raked with a comb to create texture. Hatting felt, sewing tape, and more layers of gesso helped to build up the design before the panels were painted and gilded.

"My days slip by without a scrap of artistic work being done. Why women fail in art is answered to myself ‘because of the little things in life’. "

"Ah, if we could but work fanatically in the light of our own 19th century thought … fight against immorality, seeing the injustice of recent social opinions, against the sacrifice of sacrificing women, against intemperance, against the desire for wealth, & the hideous inequality of distribution to living in at least the universal brotherhood! A return to our true balance, man with woman, both with nature, which means health, beauty, innocence." Excerpts from The Diary of Mary Watts 1887 – 1904, Desna Greenhow (ed.), London, 2016