Watts Gallery
The brilliance of Cicely Mary Barker
When Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies of the Spring was published in 1923, a post-first world war mass wishful belief…
The ‘idiot’ artists whose surreal visions flourished in Victorian asylums
In G.F. Watts’s former sculpture studio in the Surrey village of Compton, a monstrous presence has interposed itself between the…
Maximum wattage
On his deathbed in 1904, George Frederic Watts saw a extraordinary spectacle. He witnessed the universe coming into being: the…
Portrait of the artist as a madman
Charles Dickens’s description of Cobham Park, Kent, in The Pickwick Papers makes it seem a perfect English landscape. Among its…
A look ahead
Andrew Lambirth reveals the treats on show in 2014
The good and the ugly
The Watts Gallery, just outside Guildford off the Hog’s Back, is a delightful place to visit at any season, with…
