National Art Pass offers available at Watts Gallery – Artists' Village

50% off entry
£13.50  £6.75 Standard entry price
IndividualTiana Clarke Please note this is an example card and not a reflection of the final product

50% off entry at Watts Gallery – Artists' Village

The National Art Pass lets you enjoy free entry to hundreds of museums, galleries and historic places across the UK, while raising money to support them.

Watts Gallery – Artists' Village, exterior
Museum

Watts Gallery – Artists' Village

Compton

With a National Art Pass you get

50% off entry
£13.50 £6.75 Standard entry price
IndividualTiana Clarke Please note this is an example card and not a reflection of the final product

The more you see, the more we do.

The National Art Pass lets you enjoy free entry to hundreds of museums, galleries and historic places across the UK, while raising money to support them.

indicates offers with National Art Pass

Dedicated to the life and work of Victorian painter and sculptor GF Watts and his wife, designer and artist Mary Watts, this gallery is a unique Arts & Crafts gem nestled in the Surrey Hills.

The building, intended to provide 'art for all', was finished shortly before the death of GF Watts, and quickly became a much-loved local attraction. One hundred years later it was crumbling into decrepitude, but has since been sensitively restored and adapted. It was nominated for the Art Fund Prize 2012. The museum reopened Watts's Great Studio in winter 2015 following a major re-presentation project.

In 2017, the gallery ran a successful Art Happens crowdfunding campaign to secure the final funds needed to site a new cast of GF Watts' Physical Energy sculpture in a prominent location near the gallery.

The gallery walls glow with deep crimson, rich greens and subtle blue-greys. They are hung with a large selection of Watts' works including portraits, landscapes, sculptures, narrative paintings and allegorical works. Marking the beginning of his 70-year artistic career is a charmingly vulnerable early self portrait at the age of 17, while his maturity is represented by ambitious symbolist works such as Time, Death and Judgement and The Sower of the Systems. Watts was trying to capture eternal spiritual truths in these allegories, but there are also subject paintings and portraits more firmly rooted in the Victorian world.

An unusual trilogy of canvases from 1849-50 depicts the sufferings of the poor: Under a Dry Arch, The Irish Famine and Found Drowned, show destitution, starvation and suicide. These themes were unusual for Watts, and he did not exhibit the pictures until long after he finished them, but they have a Dickensian power and directness.

The gallery has a temporary exhibition space, and an airy glass-fronted Sculpture Gallery, which is dominated by two enormous plaster models of Tennyson and Physical Energy, as well as death masks and smaller sculpted figures that Watts used for his paintings.

A short walk away is the Arts and Crafts mortuary chapel designed by Mary Watts, the exterior a riot of terracotta decoration and the interior encrusted with colourful stucco angels.

Are your sure you want to leave checkout?