
Exploring Surrey: G F and Mary Watts in Surrey – GI 25 046
30 June 2025 @ 10:00 am - 1:00 pm BST
Tutor: Dr Lucy Ella Rose
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Learn about the life, work and network of Victorian celebrities and their legacy in Surrey. The couple – professional craftswoman Mary Seton Watts and ‘England’s Michelangelo’ George Frederic Watts – worked in creative partnership at their studio-home in Compton, now Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village. Explore Mary’s innovative ceramic work and pioneering suffrage activism, and George’s famous symbolist paintings and portrait collection, considering the global reach of their artistic visions and their influence on today’s culture.
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About the Speaker
Dr Lucy Ella Rose
Lucy Ella completed her PhD at the University of Surrey in 2015, before joining the School of Literature and Languages as Teaching Fellow in 2016 and Lecturer in Victorian Literature in 2017. Her doctoral studentship, awarded by the University of Surrey and Watts Gallery (Surrey) in their first collaboration, supported her research on women in nineteenth-century creative partnerships. These included Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Mary and George Frederic Watts, and Evelyn and William De Morgan. Lucy Ella has worked extensively on the Mary Watts archive at Watts Gallery and assisted the transcription of her diaries for publication.
Lucy Ella specialises in Victorian literature, art, culture and feminism (their connections and intersections), with an interest in late-Victorian creative partnerships, focusing on neglected female figures. Her publications include a monograph, Suffragist Artists in Partnership: Gender, Word and Image (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), and book chapters and articles on Victorian women's life writing, visual culture, artistic marriages, creative circles and early feminist networks.
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