My canal holiday in 2006 with Dr Bones was moderately calamitous, at least after she broke her thumb and we found ourselves moored only yards from where we started, opposite a house owned by members of the Lamford congregation, and hiding whenever anyone came along the towpath in case we knew them. But we did visit the Watts Cemetery Chapel at Compton, and last Monday I had a return trip there, led round by a volunteer at the Watts Gallery who happens to belong to the Catholic congregation in Swanvale Halt.
Despite our guide's best efforts to convince us of the Christian orthodoxy of the building I am no better disposed towards it in that respect than I was before. The dense, elaborate symbolism does include an extremely disguised cross on the dramatic main door, but the rest of it renders abstract concepts and ideals in plaster, terracotta and paint, and has that sense of conceptual (and angelic) hierarchy you get with late 19th-century occult thought of different sorts. At least the weird and off-putting altarpiece, Watts's painting The All-Pervading, is away for restoration. To me it looks like the Emperor Palpatine in a relatively benign mood.
But there is no denying the specifically artistic achievement of the Chapel, the imagination behind it and the industry which produced it. The exterior is covered with terracotta panels, the inside with gesso laid on chicken wire with gesso panels bearing the artwork laid on top and then painted. What I hadn't realised was that Mary Watts, deeply committed all her life to the ideal of art education, had virtually the whole village involved in the Chapel's construction. Everyone in the pottery classes, from well-to-do ladies to farm hands, combined to produce the terracotta panels and you can see this if you look carefully: they've clearly been made by people of differing abilities. Whether the rougher ones were the work of the ladies or the labourers we will never know.
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