The story
In April 1904 George Frederic Watts, then 87 and one of the most celebrated painters of Victorian Britain, saw a gallery for his own work open in the Surrey village of Compton, a short walk from his country home, Limnerslease. He died that July.
He had planned it with his wife, the designer Mary Seton Watts, and the architect Christopher Hatton Turnor drew it in an Arts and Crafts manner, with top-lit rooms so the pictures hang in daylight. More than 100 of Watts's paintings are on show, spanning about 70 years of his career, from portraits and landscapes to the large symbolic canvases. One of them is After the Deluge, finished in 1891, in which a blazing sun breaks over empty water after Noah's flood.
Nearby, in the village cemetery, stands the Watts Cemetery Chapel, which Mary designed and decorated with the help of villagers she taught to model clay, and the gallery looks after it today. The gallery closed in 2008 for a restoration backed by a 4.3 million pound Heritage Lottery grant and reopened in 2011, and in 2016 Limnerslease, the couple's house and studio, opened to visitors as well.
