Watts Gallery
The School of English and Languages at the University of Surrey is proud of its links with Watts Gallery, an outstanding local gallery dedicated to the work of Victorian artist G. F. Watts, that of his wife Mary Watts, and to Victorian art and culture more generally. Watts Gallery and the University of Surrey celebrated the bicentenary of Charles Dickens in 2012 with an international two-day conference, Dickens and the Visual Imagination (9-10 July 2012). Hosted by the Paul Mellon Centre in London and the University of Surrey, with a reception at Watts Gallery to coincide with its Dickens and the Artists exhibition, this conference explored the interfaces between art history and literary scholarship through the work of Charles Dickens (see the Surrey English blog for a report on the conference). The University of Surrey’s Lewis Elton Gallery – which has held exhibitions on G. F. and Mary Watts and on one of their contemporaries, nineteenth-century artist Anna Lea Merritt – also hosted the Dickens Illustrated exhibition (26 June-12 July 2012) in association with Watts Gallery, featuring illustrations from the 1830s to the present day. Watts Gallery and the University of Surrey have also created a collaborative PhD studentship to enable new research into the Watts collection. The recipient of the studentship is working on the Mary Watts archive, helping to bring to light the contents of Mary Watts’s private diaries and journals, her professional partnership with her husband, and her relation to the early feminism of the nineteenth century.
Photograph of G. F. Watts's Physical Energy (1904) by Anne Purkiss. © Watts Gallery.
