Watts Gallery 1907 - 38

A number of changes occurred during these years, the first being the addition in the early 1910s of a corridor to link the Sculpture Gallery to the potters’ recreation room; as the curator recalled, this corridor ‘was filled with photographs of pictures and drawings [by Watts] which are not to be seen in the Collection’. The most dramatic addition was realized around 1925 with the construction of the Sunken Gallery (now the Richard Jefferies Gallery) designed by Laurence Powell, a local architect. The primary reason was to create more hanging space and for many years it acted as a gallery of Watts’s portraits. 

As the century progressed and Modernism developed, Watts’s reputation declined, and although Mary observed the changing attitudes, she was resolute in upholding the gallery’s vision. When she died in 1938, major alterations took place within the gallery including redecoration and the erection of partitions in the Red Gallery. Wall colours were changed to lighter tones, the picture rail was lowered to avoid hanging too high, and walls were built that closed down the large open space. According to The Times, the changes had ‘the primary object of enabling the pictures to be better seen’. This involved ‘improved lighting and more suitable decorations for the walls … For the colouring of the walls, which, as originally applied, is rather “fierce”, a neutral tint has been adopted of a tone corresponding to the average middle-tone of the pictures, giving value to their light and darks.’