Watts Symposium
2010 Watts Symposium
In partnership with NADFAS West Surrey Area
Day One: Decorating Sacred Spaces
Friday 9 July
The Wren Suite, St Paul’s Cathedral, London EC4M 9AD
1-5pm (PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF TIME FROM 2PM START)
Day Two: The Word in the Pattern:
Mary Watts’s Chapel
Saturday 10 July
Compton Village Hall, Compton, Surrey GU3
10am-5pm
Celebrate the magnificent Cemetery Chapel created by Mary Watts for the village of Compton. This nationally important Grade I listed building, Byzantine in shape and Celtic in decoration, stands on Budburrow Hill less than half a mile from Watts Gallery.
Its importance lies not only in its unique design, but in its rich decoration; terracotta on its exterior and painted gesso interior. The decoration is heavy with symbolism expressed through a wide range of images.
Confirmed Speakers to-date:
Day One:
Richard Dorment
Art Critic, Daily Telegraph
Timothy Hyman
Painter; lead curator of the Tate's Stanley Spencer retrospective 2001; co-curator of "British Vision" (Ghent, 2007-8)
Christopher Le Brun RA
Artist
Simon Carter
Collections Manager, St Paul’s Cathedral
Hilary Underwood
Tutor in the History of Art, University of Surrey and Curatorial Adviser, Watts Gallery
Professor Simon Olding
Director, Crafts Study Centre
Ayla Lepine
Visiting Lecturer, Courtauld Institute of Art
Mark Bills
Curator, Watts Gallery
Day two:
Alan Bott OBE, MA, FSA
Chairman of Godalming Museum Trust, Churchwarden of Godalming Parish Church
Catherine Hilary
Curatorial Fellow, Watts Gallery
Dr Louise Boreham
Retired Lecturer & Independent Researcher
Janet Lee
MA History of Art and Design (Bristol), unpublished MA dissertation: Spirit, Symbol and Devotion: the Watts Chapel (1895-1904); Jungian Psychotherapist
Barbara Bryant
Consultant Curator and art historian; co-curator GF Watts: Victorian Visionary (2008); author of GF Watts Portraits (NPG, 2004) and the recently published GF Watts in Kensington: Little Holland House and Gallery
Mark Bills
Curator, Watts Gallery
Dr Desna Greenhow
Curatorial Projects, Watts Gallery
Hilary Underwood
Tutor in the History of Art, University of Surrey and Curatorial Adviser, Watts Gallery
Marian Williams
Cemetery Chapel Committee
Veronica Franklin Gould
Author of G. F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian (Yale University Press, 2004) and Curator of The Vision of G. F. Watts (Watts Gallery, 2004)
For more information and latest updates regarding the speakers click here
Day One: £15 incl. entrance to Cathedral, tea/coffee
Day Two: £35 to include lunch and refreshments, an accompanied visit to the Chapel and evening drinks with live chamber music.
£45 for both days
£65 to include Watts Gallery Friends membership
For further Information email us at:
symposium@wattsgallery.org.uk or call 01483 810235
NOTE: All speakers are subject to change.
Abstracts
Chairman: Graham Howes
GRAHAM HOWES is a sociologist of religion, an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge and a Trustee of ACE (the Art and Christianity Enquiry). He lectures extensively in Britain and abroad, and has written widely on topics relating to art and spirituality. His ‘The Art of the Sacred’ was published in 2007, and explores the relationship between religion and the visual arts -and vice versa – within Christianity and other major religious traditions.
Richard Dorment
Art Critic, The Daily Telegraph
Expect the Unexpected: First Encounters with Contemporary Art
Richard Dorment, Art Critic for the Daily Telegraph for almost 25 years discusses four works of contemporary art that he came upon out of the blue and never saw again - but that have haunted his imagination ever since.
Timothy Hyman
Painter; Lead Curator of Tate’s Stanley Spencer Retrospective 2001; Co-curator of British Vision (Ghent, 2007-2008)
Stanley Spencer at Burghclere
The perennial dream of a renewed public mural art was shared by many 20th century painters, though most remained unfulfilled. In 1916, as a lowly Hospital orderly, Spencer conceived a frescoed Chapel of Peace: in 1923 he completed detailed drawings for these imaginary walls. Promptly -almost miraculously- patrons appeared; and with that famous cry of "What-Ho, Giotto", Spencer embarked on the vast undertaking that would occupy him exclusively between 1927 and 1932....
TIMOTHY HYMAN trained at the Slade; the most recent among his nine London solo exhibitions was The Man Inscribed with London at Austin/ Desmond in October 2009. His monographs on Bonnard and Sienese Painting are published by Thames and Hudson. He was lead curator for the Tate's Stanley Spencer retrospective in 2001. He was co- curator of British Vision (including 16 Spencers ) at Ghent 2007-8 .
Christopher Le Brun
Christopher Le Brun talks about his 1996 commission The Parables, painted for the choir of Liverpool Anglican Cathedral. He also discusses Symbolism and the parallels between his work as a painter and sculptor and that of G.F.Watts.
Christopher Le Brun was born in Portsmouth in 1951. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1970-74 and at Chelsea School of Art from 1974-75. Le Brun has exhibited in many significant surveys of international art, including Nuova Immagine, Milan 1981, Zeitgeist Berlin 1982, Avant-garde in the Eighties, Los Angeles 1987 and Contemporary Voices, Museum of Modern Art New York 2005. From 1987-88 he received the D.A.A.D. award from the German Government, living and working in Berlin for a year. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1996 and in 2000 became the Academy's first Professor of Drawing. In 1996 he was commissioned by the Jerusalem Trust for paintings for the choir of Liverpool Anglican Cathedral. Le Brun is a former trustee of the Tate, the National Gallery, and the Dulwich Picture Gallery. He is a trustee of the Prince's Drawing School.
An exhibition of his drawings is currently on show at Abbott and Holder Ltd. from 3rd to the 10th of July.
Simon Carter
Collections Manager, St Paul’s Cathedral
A Brush with Faith (The paintings collection of St Paul’s Cathedral)
The paintings collection of St Paul’s includes works of international importance such as William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World, given to the cathedral in 1908 by the philanthropist Charles Booth; an enormous roundel by Frederick Lord Leighton entitled The Sea Gave Up the Dead originally made in 1878 as a design for the decoration of the interior of the dome; and one of the most powerful allegorical works painted by G.F. Watts - Time Death and Judgement. Drawing on high-lights from the St Paul’s collections, this talk will present how and why the cathedral acquired its collection of paintings and where the works of G.F. Watts fit within this body of material.
Simon Carter is the Collections Manager at St Paul’s Cathedral, where working with the Librarian, Architectural Archivist and Objects Conservator he manages the long term preservation of the collections, on-going research into their significance and public access and promotion of the collections. These include a great variety of objects associated with the history of the construction and decoration of St Paul’s Cathedral and objects which have been or still are used or presented within the building. Simon Carter has catalogued aspects of the collections of York City Art Gallery, was Assistant Keeper of Fine and Decorative Arts at The Cecil Higgins Art Gallery Bedford, and from 2002 to 2008 worked on a project team at the Victoria and Albert Museum creating the recently opened Medieval and Renaissance Galleries.
Hilary Underwood
Hilary Underwood studied painting at Wimbledon School of Art and specialised in Victorian art in postgraduate study at the Courtauld institute of Art. She was assistant curator at Watts Gallery between 1988 and 1994 where she is now curatorial advisor. She currently teaches the history of art in the Humanities programme of the English Department of the University of Surrey. Her publications include Painting the Cosmos: Landscapes by G. F. Watts with Allen Staley (2006) and G. F. Watts: Parables in Paint (2008), an exhibition of Watts’s religious art held at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Artists and the Church in Britain
This paper is designed to provide an overview of artists’ involvement in the decoration of churches in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a background to the specialist papers of the conference. The resistance to religious imagery in British churches in the post reformation period will be briefly surveyed.
The Gothic revival and the revival of interest in mural art surrounding the Palace of Westminster scheme created new opportunities for church artists, both in medieval mode, such as William Dyce and in Renaissance mode, such as Frederic Leighton and George Frederic Watts. The Watts Chapel is part of an Arts and Crafts movement interest in symbolic decoration and the integration of fine art, decorative art and architecture, and will be compared to works by Pheobe Traquair, Charles Harrison Townsend and Harry Payne. Finally the relationship between modernism and church art will be considered, including work by Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore.
Mary Watts and the revival of Low Relief Polychrome Gesso Decoration
The decorative work of Mary Watts in Watts Chapel can be placed in the context of a broader revival of interest in low relief polychrome decoration, based on historical prototypes. There is some context in Renaissance ceramic work, which also resulted in the late Victorian glazed reliefs by Doulton. Other potential inspirations are the figurative plaster friezes and ceilings of the Tudor and Stuart period. These were subject to historicist interest and revival in the mid nineteenth century and freer revival in the Arts and Crafts movement. This paper places Mary Watts’s work in the context of panels and architectural work by Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, Anning Bell, Baillie Scott, Margaret Macdonald, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Gerald Edward Moira and Frank Lynn Jenkins.
Professor Simon Olding
Director, Crafts Study Centre
Ceramics and the heritage of place
This paper will consider the work of three leading contemporary ceramicists, who have, in differing ways, addressed the spirit of place in their practice. Magdalene Odundo radically changed her work for an intervention in the Victorian arena of the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum; Edmund de Waal has made a particular feature of installations in sensitive heritage settings, and Ashley Howard has made work for an exhibition in the Retro Choir of Winchester Cathedral. The issues of transformation, provocation and respect for heritage sites will be considered.
Professor Simon Olding is a curator and writer, and Director of the Crafts Study Centre, University for the Creative Arts.
Ayla Lepine
Visiting Lecturer, Courtauld Institute of Art
‘Clothing the Body: G. F. Bodley’s Reredos and Vestments for St Paul’s Cathedral’
In addition to designing numerous Gothic Revival churches from the 1850s until his death, the architect George Frederick Bodley (182-1907) also co-founded the ecclesiastical textiles and furnishings firm, Watts & Company, alongside Thomas Garner and George Gilbert Scott, junior in 1874. In this capacity, surviving evidence of Bodley’s work for St Paul’s Cathedral exists as a set of copes designed for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. A decade earlier, Bodley had been commissioned to produce a new reredos for the Cathedral. Remarkably, for this he turned not to his beloved gothic, but to classicism to express the power and beauty of holiness. In a series of 12 marble and gilt sculptures, Bodley used aesthetic strategies comparable his contemporaries in the emergent New Sculpture movement, including Frederick William Pomeroy and Frederic Leighton. The reredos sustained minor bomb damage in World War II; following its removal it languished in a small museum for decades before its fragments were individually sold in New York in 2005.
Engaging recent theological positions on sacred space and the arts developed by Allan Doig and Lindsay Jones, this paper takes Bodley’s contributions to St Paul’s as a case study through which the intertwined world of vestment and architectural design can be explored as a legible hermeneutics of religious conviction. Finally, by considering both textile and stone as material instances of ‘clothing’ which sustain tension between covering and uncovering the body, this paper will connect Bodley’s output at St Paul’s in the late nineteenth century to the deployment of pattern and repetition in the figural sculptural reliefs populating the interior of the Watts Chapel.
Ayla Lepine is completing a PhD entitled ‘Sacred Beauty: George Frederick Bodley’s Designs for Oxford and Cambridge, 1858-1907’ with Dr Caroline Arscott. Her research investigates points of intersection between theology and aesthetics in the Gothic Revival. She teaches undergraduate courses on nineteenth-century architecture and art at the Courtauld Institute.
Mark Bills
Curator, Watts Gallery
Compton Cemetery Chapel
Compton Cemetery Chapel is a grade I listed building, created by Mary Watts (1849-1938) between 1894 and 1904. Mary’s book, The Word in the Pattern, which outlined her ideas for its symbols, along with the rich sources that she drew upon, is the basis of the text. She knew that her carefully planned symbolism would not be immediately open to all who saw it and it is ‘exoteric and esoteric in its character, being in some instances so plain and simple… and in others so hidden and intricate…’ This talk will consider the symbolism of the glorious Arts and Crafts patterns that decorate its interior and exterior.
Mark Bills is Curator of Watts Gallery and was formerly Senior Curator of Paintings, Prints and Drawings at the Museum of London and Visual Arts Officer at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum. He has published widely on nineteenth-century art, including (with Vivien Knight) William Powell Frith: Painting the Victorian Age (2006) and (with Barbara Bryant) G.F. Watts: Victorian Visionary (2008), as well as numerous articles for magazines such as the Burlington Magazine and Apollo. He has curated national and international exhibitions, including A Victorian Salon at the Dahesh Museum, New York, and Satirizing London at the Museum of London, for which he wrote the accompanying book, The Art of Satire, London in Caricature (2006).
Catherine Hilary
Curatorial Fellow, Watts Gallery
Mary Seton Fraser Tyler (1849- 1938) grew up on the shores of Loch Ness, in Scotland. She trained at the Slade School of Art and South Kensington School in London and had met Watts around 1870. In 1886, at the age of thirty- seven, Mary married the sixty- nine year old George Frederic Watts.
George and Mary inspired each other artistically and they were actively involved in the Home Arts and Industries Association. They settled in their new home, Limnerslease in Compton, Surrey in 1890 and sought to decorate it using traditional crafts.
In the Red Room, or drawing room, Mary designed and applied a vibrantly coloured and gilded niche and a carved fireplace. She modelled symbolic clay panels in order to decorate the ceiling, which she installed as a memorial to her husband’s life and work. In her diaries, Mary wrote about the union: ‘It is to be the concrete expression of the spiritual atmosphere that Signor has around him- the aroma of his thought put into the silent language of my symbols’.
This talk will explore Mary, her artistic training and the creation of the ceiling in the Red room at Limnerslease. It will discuss the symbols that George and especially Mary were interested in during this time, including the great themes of life, universe and spirituality.
Catherine Hilary has been working at Watts Gallery since August 2009. Her post is a training position and she works closely with the Curator to support all curatorial activities including collections management, exhibitions, research, display and interpretation. Catherine has studied a Masters in Cultural Heritage Studies at UCL in London, an Undergraduate degree in History of Art and English at The University of Aberdeen and an Art Foundation at University of Ulster.
Dr Louise Boreham
Retired Lecturer & Independent Researcher
Louis Deuchars & the Chapel
In her book about the Compton Cemetery Chapel, The Word in the Pattern, Mrs Watts acknowledged the work of four permanent workers. One of these was my grandfather, Louis Reid Deuchars (1870 – 1927). Having arrived towards the end of 1895, he soon got into the way of interpreting Mrs Watts’s designs and became tutor of the modelling classes she arranged for the villagers in the billiard room at Limnerslease. Although Deuchars had followed various art-related occupations in Glasgow prior to securing the position at Compton, he benefited greatly from working with both George and Mary Watts and was soon sending examples of his own work to the New Gallery and other exhibitions. This paper looks at his major role in the modelling for the chapel and the influences he carried forward with him in his career after Compton.
Following retirement from a lecturing career, Louise Boreham completed her PhD on the Relationship between Sculptors and Architects, published articles in journals and contributed to books and web-sites.
Janet Lee
MA History of Art and Design (Bristol), unpublished MA dissertation: Spirit, Symbol and Devotion: the Watts Chapel (1895-1904); Jungian Psychotherapist
The Cemetery Chapel at Compton: Mary -and G F - Watts’ syncretic House of Life
In The Word in the Pattern, Mary tells us that the chapel...“has on its walls the story...of the spiritual life, on the wings of which, in the passage between the mystery of birth and the mystery of death, material life is lifted to the glorious consciousness of its affinity with the Infinite”. Not only does this encapsulate the fabric of her life with G F Watts, with their shared interest in symbolist and spiritual ideas from all cultures and all ages, but it also affirms their shared purpose after their marriage to realise his vision for a body of artistic work, the House of Life, Symbolist in concept, in which symbols would represent and unite noble ideas and qualities in a synthesis of spiritual, moral and intellectual aspirations; to do this it would draw on all myths and religions.
Using Mary’s notebooks and other contemporary and ancient sources, this paper looks at the Chapel’s symbolism in the context of the art of death and rebirth/resurrection in both Christian and other spiritual cultures, drawing in particular on the ancient symbolist art and myth of the Picts, the early Christians - Celtic, Byzantine and Roman, the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Scandinavians, Hindus and Muslims. This syncretic fin-de-siècle fusion of spiritual cultures, made material in this glorious and sublime temple Chapel of symbolism, places the Watts as pivotal in the new movement in spiritual art which emerged in the 19th century, came full circle in the Chapel, and which continued on to steer the modernism of the early 20th century.
Janet Lee has always been passionate about Art Nouveau and Symbolist art, and enthralled by the new intellectual, psychological and spiritual ideas and artistic movements of the fin-de-siècle. She opted to retire early from an extensive career as a senior broadcasting executive in order to train as a Jungian psychotherapist, and has a part-time practice in central London which includes clinical hypnosis. At the same time, she joined the important band of mature students with the enthusiasm, time and means to explore and highlight the many uncelebrated treasures of our art and cultural history, attending classes at the V&A which led to study at the University of Bristol (where years before she gained her BA (Hons.) in Drama, English and Philosophy). She is also interested in myth and ancient religions, and is a member of the C G Jung Analytical Psychology Club, London and the Theosophical Society in England. After studying the Chapel and early Christian symbolism this year, Janet was astonished to discover she is related through her maternal grandmother, Edith Audsley, to Arts &Crafts architects W & G Audsley, authors of the 1865 Handbook of Christian Symbolism, which Mary Watts named as a main source for the Chapel’s symbols.
Barbara Bryant - Consultant Curator
Before the Altarpiece: “The All-Pervading” by G.F. Watts in the 1880s and 1890s
Watts presented his large oil painting ‘The All-Pervading’ to the Tate Gallery in 1899 as an addition to his bequest of 1897. Until 1997, with its selection and restoration for the exhibition The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts: Symbolism in Britain 1860-1910, it was all but unknown. Yet although this prime version languished in storage, another version was always visible in the Watts Cemetery Chapel. Here in a completely different context from the one the artist originally envisaged, it functioned as a secular altarpiece
My paper will discuss the genesis of the composition of ‘The All-Pervading’ in the later 1880s. Its enigmatic meaning and links with thematically related works by Watts and other artists will be considered, as will the painting’s exhibition history and display at the artist’s own gallery at Little Holland House on Melbury Road.
Barbara Bryant is the author of G.F. Watts in Kensington: Little Holland House and Gallery (2009) and GF Watts: Portraits – Fame & Beauty in Victorian Society which accompanied a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2004. She is the co-author (with Mark Bills) of GF Watts: Victorian Visionary (Yale University Press, 2008). Earlier publications include her contributions to the Tate's exhibition The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts: Symbolism in Britain 1860-1910 in 1997 and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Watts, as well as articles and essays on other aspects of 18th and 19th century British art, most recently her essay on Frederic Leighton as a collector of fine art for the reopened Leighton House Museum. She has contributed a chapter to the book for the forthcoming exhibition The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement in Britain, 1860-1900 at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She trained as an art historian at Columbia University, New York, and began her work on G.F. Watts as an assistant on the exhibition Victorian High Renaissance (Manchester, Minneapolis, Brooklyn 1978-9).
Mark Bills
Curator, Watts Gallery
The Word in the Pattern: The Chapel and St John
The symbolism of the Watts Chapel draws heavily on Biblical sources. Predominant amongst these are words and ideas drawn directly from St John. This paper will illustrate how St John is woven into the symbols and explore the impact of his theology on the development of the chapel.
Mark Bills is Curator of Watts Gallery and was formerly Senior Curator of Paintings, Prints and Drawings at the Museum of London and Visual Arts Officer at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum. He has published widely on nineteenth-century art, including (with Vivien Knight) William Powell Frith: Painting the Victorian Age (2006) and (with Barbara Bryant) G.F. Watts: Victorian Visionary (2008), as well as numerous articles for magazines such as the Burlington Magazine and Apollo. He has curated national and international exhibitions, including A Victorian Salon at the Dahesh Museum, New York, and Satirizing London at the Museum of London, for which he wrote the accompanying book, The Art of Satire, London in Caricature (2006).
Dr Desna Greenhow
Curatorial Projects, Watts Gallery
Celtic Art in Mary Watts’s vision for the Chapel
Part of the origin of Mary’s enthusiasm for Celtic decoration she gained from manuscripts and books she studied in the British Museum. In her diaries and notebooks she shows how she saw Celtic symbolism as perfect for her purpose of illustrating universal spirituality in her chapel.In The Word in the Pattern she writes about the importance of each symbol to her whole message.
Using abstract decoration, as well as figurative, she draws heavily on the Books of Durrow and Lindisfarne for her flowing images, and on the Book of Kells for her figures of the Evangelists, and decorations round the altar.
The Celtic Revival in Scotland and Ireland was widely appreciated in the late nineteenth century, and Mary had an affinity with the arts of her native country, and connections with artists there. So also did Burne-Jones and Walter Crane, who influenced her in aspects of the chapel decoration.
Finally, Mary’s decoration was also a product of the era she lived in, and is a fascinating mix of symbolism from Celtic and other cultures, centred on her own unique interpretation.
Desna Greenhow: Education: MA in History at Trinity College, Dublin and Ph.D (1993) at Exeter University which included studying Celtic Christianity; Lecturing for the extra-mural department of Exeter University; Director for 25 years of Otterton Mill Arts Centre and Working Museum in Devon.
2003-present: curatorial projects for Watts Gallery, including compiling and contributing to publications, project managing exhibitions, interviewing, and collating collections for the Watts archive.
Hilary Underwood
Hilary Underwood studied painting at Wimbledon School of Art and specialised in Victorian art in postgraduate study at the Courtauld institute of Art. She was assistant curator at Watts Gallery between 1988 and 1994 where she is now curatorial advisor. She currently teaches the history of art in the Humanities programme of the English Department of the University of Surrey. Her publications include Painting the Cosmos: Landscapes by G. F. Watts with Allen Staley (2006) and G. F. Watts: Parables in Paint (2008), an exhibition of Watts’s religious art held at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Mary Watts and the revival of Low Relief Polychrome Gesso Decoration
The decorative work of Mary Watts in Watts Chapel can be placed in the context of a broader revival of interest in low relief polychrome decoration, based on historical prototypes. There is some context in Renaissance ceramic work, which also resulted in the late Victorian glazed reliefs by Doulton. Other potential inspirations are the figurative plaster friezes and ceilings of the Tudor and Stuart period. These were subject to historicist interest and revival in the mid nineteenth century and freer revival in the Arts and Crafts movement. This paper places Mary Watts’s work in the context of panels and architectural work by Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, Anning Bell, Baillie Scott, Margaret Macdonald, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Gerald Edward Moira and Frank Lynn Jenkins.
Marian Williams
Cemetery Chapel Committee
ABOUT THE CHAPEL TODAY
The Watts Cemetery, Memorial Cloister and Mortuary Chapel are owned managed and maintained by the Compton Parish Council. The Council employs a resident Caretaker who lives in the adjacent Cemetery Lodge.
In 1995 the Watts Chapel Preservation and Restoration Fund was set up to hold funds for the preservation of the property with particular reference to roof repair work done at that time: nevertheless at present almost the entire duty of care and maintenance falls on the Parish Council.
That care is largely managed by the Cemetery sub Committee of the Council. The committee is comprised of a member of the Parish Council, the Curator of the Watts Gallery, the Caretaker and two other local people with particular interest in the site. The Parish Clerk also attends the meetings. All final decisions regarding expenditure are made by the Parish Council and the duty of care for the site with its Grade 1 listed Chapel is considerable; funds available from the Parish budget are obviously very limited. The only income for the Cemetery site is from burials and the donations box in the Chapel.
The primary purpose of this site is as the village burial ground; created when the Church yard was closed for burials in 1896.However the site now attracts a considerable number of visitors. The Parish Council and its Cemetery Committee are very careful to maintain the balance between the primary purpose on the one hand and offering a welcome to our visitors, who hail from all over the world, on the other.