Mary Fraser Tytler

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mary Fraser Tytler (married name Mary Seton Watts) (1849 - 1938) was a symbolist craftswoman, designer and social reformer. She was born in India, but spent much of her youth in Scotland and settled in England in the 1860s. Primarily a portrait painter, on her marriage to George Frederic Watts in 1886, she abandoned this is favor of Celtic and Art Nouveau bas-reliefs, pottery, metalwork and textiles. She co-founded the Compton Potters Guild and the Arts & Crafts Guild in Compton, Surrey, England. She designed, built and maintained the Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton (1895); and had built and maintained the Watts Gallery (1903-04) for the preservation of her husband's work.

Mary worked to create employment for impoverished people through the preservation of rural handicrafts, as well as trained workers in clay modelling for the Compton Potters' Guild and the work executed on the Watts Mortuary Chapel. She was a firm believer in the idea that anyone given the opportunity could produce things of beauty and that everyone should have a craft within which they could express themselves creatively. She supported the revival of the Celtic style, the indigenous artistic expression of Scotland and Ireland. In 1899, she was asked to design rugs in this style for the carpet company Alexander Morton. In cooperation with the Congested Districts Board, Morton had established a workshop in Donegal, Ireland, to employ local women, who had very little opportunity of earning a livelihood.

Mary pioneered Liberty's Celtic style, with much of the imagery for the Celtic Revival carpets, book-bindings, metalwork and textiles for Liberty being based on her earlier designs at the Watts Mortuary Chapel.