Andrew visits the Watts gallery.mp4

George Frederick Watts was once thought to be Britain's greatest painter but after his Victorian heyday he fell out of fashion and the Watts Gallery in Surrey built to house his work fell into woeful disrepair. But after coming runner-up in the BBC's Restoration Village series 11 million pounds worth of renovation ensued and this beautiful arts and crafts building has now been brought back from the brink. I thought this was the perfect time to reassess the painter's work and his place in history. The village of Compton is nestled in the Surrey hills and is in many ways a typical English country village but don't let appearances be deceptive because Compton has a bit more to offer. Now I'm on the ancient pilgrim's way from Winchester to Canterbury but I'm not on a religious pilgrimage I'm on an artistic one because unlikely though it may seem just over there not quite in the middle of nowhere but definitely off the beaten track stands a unique monument to one of the most remarkable and fascinating also overlooked artists of the entire 19th century. The Watts Gallery devoted to the work of George Frederick Watts first opened its doors in April 1904. Watts and his wife Mary were pioneers of Victorian arts and crafts and moved from London to Compton in the late 1880s. They commissioned local architect Christopher Hatton Turner to design a gallery for Watts's work specifying that it should be a simple and rural type of building. A building that would absolutely reflect Watts's philosophy that art should be for all. Now I've always had a great deal of affection for this eccentrically rural one-man museum but it's been a fair few years since I last came and when I did come it has to be said this was very much a magnificent ruin so I'm delighted that they have decided finally to do something about that. My only fear would be that in transforming and modernizing it they may have robbed it of some of its idiosyncratic soul but there's only one way to find out. New door. Inside the restoration doesn't disappoint. The original vivid red and turquoise walls have been exposed and magnificently bring Watts's work back to life. To learn more about the new hang of his pictures I met up with Perdita Hunt, director of the newly restored Watts Gallery. Perdita, I really like the refurbishment and I think this central gallery is great because it gives you such a sort of condensed sense of what a mercurial artist Watts was that he never stood still. One minute he's a landscape painter, the next minute he's a portrait painter. Here he's painting a complicated allegory and I noticed that you've hung this picture as it were a center stage. Why have you done that? Time, death and judgment. Pretty good theme and typical of Watts to actually take such a strong universal concept and depict it in a slightly different way. Time is here isn't it? This sort of slight glazed-eyed youth. Is that death? Well very strange that it is death. Instead of the grim reaper we have a young woman collecting the souls as the flowers in her dress. We move from this which I suppose speaks the language of pre-Raphaelitism to a degree. Suddenly we're in the world of Turner's experiments with light and colour and this notion of the world or the universe as being sort of formed by cosmic chain. Yes, great universal theme and actually a forerunner of the Symbolist movement. Watts was not tucked into a neat English niche. He was looking at what was happening in Europe. He was constantly pushing the boundaries of his art. This is about an artist who never fitted into any particular school but was always pushing genre. As well as being a deeply experimental and original artist, Watts was a man with a very strongly developed sense of conscience and in the late 1840s he painted a whole series of pictures designed to call attention to the plight of the poor. This harrowing image of an old woman huddled under a dry arch somewhere in London represents the plight of the homeless. This picture called Found Drowned which I think Watts intended to represent the image of a prostitute made so hopeless by her sense of failure and her sense of desperation that she's committed suicide and here she lies literally a piece of human flotsam washed up on the shore of life. Now Watts painted these pictures because essentially he wanted to make things better. He wanted to wake people up to the cost and the consequences of this huge industrial metropolitan expansion that came with the industrial revolution and that spirit of philanthropy that drove him throughout his life also drove I think his whole decision to base himself here at Compton. The Watts gallery was just one of many philanthropic gestures to the village. To relieve chronic unemployment in Compton Mary Watts trained locals in terracotta modelling and established a pottery. She then with help from local craftsmen built the Watts Cemetery Chapel. Watts himself died aged 87 just three months after the gallery opened. Some of the last pieces he was working on were his sculptures and the plasters are still held here at Compton. Now this is the sculpture gallery and it's always been my favourite space but I remember the last time I came here it was in a truly parlous state. The whole room stank of mildew and the sculptures themselves were clearly in a state of deterioration but now they've halted all that and I'm really glad to say that they've done it without actually spoiling the space in any way without altering the design that Watts himself created and I think what's great about it is it gives us both sides of his rather complicated personality. On the one hand you have Watts, the pillar of the Victorian establishment. On the other hand though look at this, this huge sculpture. He thought of it as his magnum opus. He was working on it till his dying day. He called it physical energy and said that it embodied man's restlessness. I think when you look at this sculpture with its raw energy you can really feel why Watts was such an important figure to so many early model artists such as Picasso even Mondrian. What I really like about what they've done with the museum is they've also decided to reactivate, to reanimate, to bring back to life Watts's original idea for this huge maquette is that he wanted it to be wheelable out into the open air. They've actually restored the pulley system. It will actually be pulled out into the garden. I think it's a brilliant metaphor for what this museum has done, this restoration has done for Watts. It's brought his work in all its glory back into the light.