ABSTRACT
In December 1905, during the Royal Scottish Academy display of the memorial exhibition of the painter George Frederick Watts, Phoebe Anna Traquair entertained his widow Mary Seton Watts to a tour of the three city buildings she had decorated since the mid-1880s. Across a range of media, British artist-craftsworkers art contained both the mysticism of Symbolist art and the tactile richness of the handmade: they celebrated the spiritual life through colour, form and pattern. By the 1890s, modernity within both the fine arts and the crafts, not to mention building design, stood for intercultural understanding and reference at least as much as indigenous traditionalism. In 1890, Arts and Crafts architect Ernest George had been commissioned to design a new home for the Wattses in Compton, for which she designed the interior. Of course, Walter Benjamin’s ‘mediumistic’ term may be seen to reflect not only building design around 1900 but also the individual components of domestic furnishing.
