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Although G F Watts (1817-1904) was arguably the most famous British artist during his lifetime, until recently much of his work has not received as much attention as he did during his lifetime.
This one-day conference, held by Watts Gallery - Artists’ Village will include Watts scholars from Europe and the United States presenting recent and new research on the work of G F Watts. This conference will showcase recent scholarship on Watts’s work around themes such as Watts’s presentation of mythology, historical and Biblical events, and Watts’s use of Symbolism in his work. Moreover, during this conference Watts Gallery - Artists’ Village will launch their new online portal on the work of G F Watts which includes in depth and recent research on 160 of Watts’s works written by Watts’s scholars over the past five years.
Speakers will include: Tim Barringer, Eva-Charlotta Mebius, Ryan Nutting, Chloe Ward, Gursimran Oberoi.
10 - 10.30am - Keynote with Tim Barringer- Watts in Contexts
10.45 - 11.15am- Ryan Nutting (20 minute presentation with a 10 minute Q&A)- 'Mr Watts is Little Known as a painter of contemporary life': Analysing late nineteenth century reactions to the social realist works by G F Watts.
11.15 - 11.45am - Chloe Ward (20 minute presentation with a 10 minute Q&A)- Writer or Rambler, Prophet or Public Intellectual?: The Tangled Texts of G F Watts12 - 1pm - Lunch break
1 - 1.30pm - Gursimran Oberoi (20 minute presentation with a 10 minute Q&A)- Global Watts: Revaluations of ‘England’s Michelangelo’
1.30 - 2pm - Eva-Charlotta Mebius (20 minute presentation with a 10 minute Q&A)
2.15 - 3.45pm - Roundtable on G F Watts with all of the conference participants (Tim, Lucy Ella Rose, Ryan, Chloe, Gursimran, Eva-Charlotta) plus Watts Gallery - Artists' Village's Dr Laura MacCulloch and Hilary Underwood.
3.45- 4pm - Closing remarks
Dr Gursimran Oberoi, King’s College London
Dr Gursimran Oberoi is an art historian who specialises in the international reception histories of British Victorian painting and sculpture. Her forthcoming book, Global Watts: Symbolism, Fame and Activism, (1880-Present Day), examines the continued exhibition, circulation and dissemination of George Frederic Watts’s symbolist artworks, delving into key histories of political appropriations involving British colonialism, South African Apartheid, International Women’s Rights, Indian Independence and African American Civil Rights. These considerations transform our understanding of the legacy of Watts’s art beyond European art history and highlight its relevance today. Gursimran has published on themes of art, reception, gender, race, and radicalism. She recently wrote about the earliest iconoclasm against art in the name of Women’s Suffrage in ‘Victorian Paintings Under Attack: The Earliest Act of Suffrage Iconoclasm (1913)’ and Pre-Raphaelitism in ‘The Collective Self-Portrait: Drawing Elizabeth Siddal in the New Woman Sisterhood’ in the catalogue accompanying Tate Britain’s 2023 exhibition, The Rossettis.
Gursimran is a Consultant in the Centre for Research Staff Development at King’s College London. She is also a trustee at the Watts Gallery Trust.
Dr Ryan Nutting
Dr Ryan Nutting is the current Early Career Research Fellow at the Watts Gallery Artists' Village. Ryan possesses experience working in museums, heritage organizations, and universities in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States. Ryan recently worked as an International Fellow at the KWI with the University of Duisberg-Essen as well as a Lecturer in History and the Programme Leader for the MA in Public History and Heritage at the University of Derby. Much of Ryan’s work focuses on the collecting, history, display and interpretation of objects to construct knowledge on places, cultures, and peoples in museums. Ryan currently has academic papers in press on the collecting and interpretation of Egypt in the late nineteenth century, and the changing interpretation of the Arctic as represented by a taxidermied polar bear in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Dr Chloe Ward, Senior Lecturer in the History of British Art, University of London.
I am the Senior Lecturer in the History of British Art at Queen Mary, University of London. My first book, The Drawings of G. F. Watts, was published by Philip Wilson in 2015 while I was the Curatorial Fellow at Watts Gallery. Research for my current book project, Art and Action: Painting for Social Change in Victorian England, was funded by an Early Career Leadership Award from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). I curated the exhibitions “Art and Action: Making Change in Victorian Britain” for Watts Gallery (2020–21) and “A Life of Drawing: Highlights from the Leighton House Collection” at Leighton House (2022–23). I received my PhD and MPhil in the history of art from King’s College, Cambridge, and a BA in art history from Barnard College, Columbia University in New York, where I won the Virginia B. Wright Prize for art history.
Tim Barringer, Professor of the Department of History of Art, Yale University.
Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor the Department of the History of Art at Yale University, of which he was Chair from 2015 to 2021. He specializes in British art and art of the British Empire. Books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005). He co-edited Frederic Leighton (1998); Colonialism and the Object (1998);Art and the British Empire (2007); Victorian Jamaica (2018) and On the Viewing Platform (2020). He was co-curator of American Sublime (Tate, 2002); Art and Emancipation in Jamaica (Yale, 2007); Before and After Modernism (2010); Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate, 2012), Thomas Cole’s Journey (Metropolitan, 2018) and Radical Victorians (Birmingham, 2024). He gave the Paul Mellon Lecture at the National Gallery, London, in 2019, on Global Landscape. His book Broken Pastoral: Art and Music in Britain, Gothic Revival to Punk Rock will be published in 2026.
Dr Lucy Ella Rose, Lecturer in Victorian Literature at The University of Surrey
Lucy Ella completed her PhD at the University of Surrey in 2015, before joining the School of Literature and Languages as Teaching Fellow in 2016 and Lecturer in Victorian Literature in 2017. Her doctoral studentship, awarded by the University of Surrey and Watts Gallery (Surrey) in their first collaboration, supported her research on women in nineteenth-century creative partnerships. These included Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Mary and George Frederic Watts, and Evelyn and William De Morgan. Lucy Ella has worked extensively on the Mary Watts archive at Watts Gallery and assisted the transcription of her diaries for publication.
Lucy Ella specialises in Victorian literature, art, culture and feminism (their connections and intersections), with an interest in late-Victorian creative partnerships, focusing on neglected female figures. Her publications include a monograph, Suffragist Artists in Partnership: Gender, Word and Image (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), and book chapters and articles on Victorian women's life writing, visual culture, artistic marriages, creative circles and early feminist networks.
Dr Eva-Charlotta Mebius, Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University
Dr Eva-Charlotta Mebius is a Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University, Honorary Research Associate at the University of London, and an independent curator. She was the Collection Online Early Career Research Fellow (Historical and Biblical) at Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village in 2020.