Anna Mary Watts (née Howitt) 1824 – 1884
Painter, writer, feminist, spiritualist.
15 January 1824 – 23 July 1884
A Tribute by Alex Round
Anna Mary Howitt, artist, activist, author and illustrator, was born into a Quaker family in Nottingham on 15th January 1824. She was the eldest of five surviving children of William and Mary Howitt, both hardworking writers who enjoyed successful careers. Together, they founded the Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress and worked collaboratively to ensure the Journal’s initial critical acclaim.
From a young age, Howitt showed precocious talent, which was encouraged by the painter Margaret Gillies, a family friend of the Howitt’s. Her parents also recognised her artistic ability and published her illustrations in Mary’s book Hymns and Fireside Verses (1839). From that point, Howitt continued to work collaboratively with her parents having also provided illustrations for their Journal, and other literary works. Through her parents, Howitt became acquainted with the literary elite including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, with the latter providing critical commentary on Howitt’s early sketches and eventually publishing her work in his own journal – Household Words. Despite financial difficulty in 1846, the Howitts continued to work hard to secure their literary careers and support their children’s aspirations. Mary was particularly determined for her daughter to be financially independent and encouraged her to publish and exhibit her work in any way that she could.
Illustration By Anna Mary Howitt for ‘The Children’s Year’ by Mary Botham Howitt, 1847, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In 1846 Mary attended Cary’s Academy on Charlotte Street, Bloomsbury, one of the few places where women could receive first-class artistic training. When her parents could no longer afford her tuition fees, the principal, Francis Cary, paid for the fees himself because he was so impressed with her talent. Her fellow students included her friend Eliza Fox (married name Bridell), Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Thomas Woolner. During her studies, she also met the painter and reformer Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon) and the writer Bessie Rayner Parkes (later Belloc) who became her closest friends. She was also at some point engaged to Edward Bateman, an illustrator whom she met through her network of artists and writers. Howitt feared, however, that marriage would restrict her career and she broke this engagement.
Having exhausted the training opportunities available to women artists at the time, Howitt and her friend, Jane Benham (also an artist), travelled to Munich to study under Wilhelm von Kaulbach in 1850. During the same year, Leigh Smith and Parkes visited Howitt and Benham in Munich, where they spent their time between serious spates of writing and painting and discussing women’s rights. Howitt wrote articles about their life in Munich and, with her mother’s editorial support, published them in the Ladies Companion, Household Words, and the Athenaeum. She later compiled her articles in book form in An Art-Student in Munich (1853) together with more material about her experiences abroad. She also wrote two serialised stories, ‘The School of Life’, whose protagonists were two young male artists. This appeared in the Illustrated Magazine of Art (1853–4) with her own illustrations and was published both as a book in 1856 and in the serialised story ‘Sisters in Art’, which appeared in the Illustrated Exhibitor (1853). The latter foregrounded the professional aspirations of the Langham Place feminists, a group that was spearheaded by Howitt, Leigh Smith and Parkes, and was comprised of a number of progressive women writers and artists. Through her work with Langham Place, she contributed a poem to The Victoria regia (1861), a book designed to showcase the talents of the women writers and contributed to Parkes’s English Woman’s Journal in 1862.
After her return home from Munich, Howitt eagerly began working on her first painting that she would put forward for exhibition. Howitt returned from Munich and began working on the first painting she would submit for public view. In 1854 she made her exhibition début at the National Institution* with Margaret Returning from the Fountain, a picture inspired by Goethe’s Faust. Her diptych, called The Lady in response to Shelley’s poem ‘The Sensitive Plant’, was exhibited at the National Institution a year later. She continued to enjoy success, having also exhibited her work at the Royal Academy in the same year.
Howitt was connected with feminist activism primarily through her friendships with Leigh Smith and Parkes. In 1859, she contributed her signature to the petition campaigning for the admission of women into the Royal Academy Schools. Thanks to Howitt and her peers, Laura Herford became the first woman artist to be admitted into the Royal Academy School in 1860. In 1856, she (alongside Leigh Smith) was involved with collecting over 3000 signatures for the 1870 Married Women’s Property Act.
Howitt’s paintings were often called ‘strong-minded’ by critics. Howitt completed her large-scale historical oil Boadicea, which was modelled for by Leigh Smith and inspired by Tennyson’s poem. The painting was exhibited at the Crystal Palace in 1856 but was subsequently rejected by the Royal Academy. She submitted it to art critic John Ruskin, who ultimately dismissed Howitt, her work and instructed her to ‘paint me [Ruskin] a pheasant’s wing’. Having had enough of the harsh criticism and brutal rejection, Howitt suffered a nervous breakdown and destroyed most of her work, determined never to exhibit again. Consequently, her only extant original drawing is one of D. G. Rossetti’s pupil and model Elizabeth Siddal, whom she drew in 1854 (pencil on paper; Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, Delaware.)
It has been stated by critics that Howitt had ceased exhibiting and publishing her work entirely after her ‘breakdown’, although there is evidence to prove that she continued to write and paint. Instead, she produced only ‘spirit-drawings’ in vermilion ink (she eventually converted to Spiritualism) as well as occasionally producing illustrations for her mother’s books. The only subsequent exhibition of her work as a painter after 1856 was From a Window, exhibited by the Society of Female Artists in 1858. In 1859, Howitt was baptised in St Michael’s Church, Highgate, as a preliminary to marrying a childhood friend, Alaric Alfred Watts, an official in the revenue office. From 1870, the couple lived at 19 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. In the 1880s, she published Pioneers of the Spiritual Reformation (1883) and co-wrote Aurora: a Volume of Verse (1884) alongside her husband. That same year Anna Mary Watts died suddenly of diphtheria at Mayr am Hof, Dietenheim, on 23 July during a visit to her mother in the Austrian Tyrol.
Although the majority of her works have been destroyed, Howitt’s legacy is a powerful, if poignant, testimony to the vision shared by women in Britain and beyond as they fought for increased visibility and legitimacy within the realms of art and politics.
*The National Institution of Fine Arts was founded in London to provide an alternative exhibition space for artists. It had looser restrictions than other established spaces such as the Royal Academy. This benefitted women, in particular, who often faced discrimination elsewhere.
Alex Round is currently an AHRC funded PhD student at Birmingham City University (in partnership with Midlands4Cities. She is also a Visiting Lecturer in English at Birmingham City University and an elected trustee of the Birmingham and Midland Institute. Her research concerns Pre-Raphaelite women, art and literature, as well as Gothic literature and prose and poetry of the nineteenth century. She is also a co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Podcast and Society’s Graduate Network.
Bibliography:
- A. L. Beaky, ‘The letters of Anna Mary Howitt to Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’, PhD diss., Columbia University, 1974
- M. Howitt, An autobiography, ed. M. Howitt, another edn (1891)
- C. R. Woodring, Victorian sampler: William and Mary Howitt (Kansas, 1952)
- A. Lee, Laurels and rosemary (1955)
- P. Hirsch, ‘Anna Mary Howitt’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2011)
- P. Hirsch, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 1827–1891: feminist, artist and rebel (1998)
- J. Marsh and P. G. Nunn, Women artists and the Pre-Raphaelite movement (1989)
- P. Gerrish Nunn, ed., Canvassing: recollections by six Victorian women artists (1986)
- J. Marsh and P. G. Nunn, Pre-Raphaelite women artists (1997) [exhibition catalogue, Manchester, Birmingham, and Southampton, 22 Nov 1997 – 2 Aug 1998]
- A. M. H. Watts, ‘A contribution towards the history of spirit-art’, Light: a journal of psychical, occult, and mystical research, 9 (13 April 1889), 176–7
MINI BIOGRAPHY
Education
In England and Germany.
Some Key Achievements and Interests
1846 Attended Henry Sass’s Art School in Bloomsbury the Principal, Francis Cary, allowing her to continue her studies when her family became unable to support her.
1850 Went to Munich with fellow artists Jane Benham to study under Wilhelm von Kaulbach, women then unable to study at Royal Academy Schools. Wrote about Munich life and society.
1854 Joined D G Rossetti’s Folio Club.
1854 Exhibited Margaret Returning from the Fountain at the National Institution of Fine Arts.
1855 Commissioned by Angela Burdett Coutts to produce a painting of Beatrice and Dante. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was the model for Beatrice.
1855 Exhibited The Lady at the Portland Gallery receiving poor reviews. Her paintings at this time made explicit social comment on double standards of morality. The Lady shows a pale young woman holding a baby with a confronting a ‘respectable’ man. Along with Barbara Leigh Smith and Bessie Parkes, Howitt spoke out about prostitution.
1855 The Castaway Exhibited at the Royal Academy again drew negative responses for the harshness of its message.
1856 Exhibited Boadicea (for which Leigh Smith again modelled) at the Crystal Palace. The painting was rejected by the Royal Academy and was criticised by Ruskin.
Helped Barbara Leigh Smith collect signatures for a petition to reform the Married Women’s Property Act.
1858 From a Window exhibited by the Society of Female Artists.
Late 1850s turned her focus to spiritualism, publishing in the spiritualist press and producing spirit drawings done while in a trance-like state.
Issues
Had to support herself by writing.
1853 Became severely depressed after breaking off her engagement to Edward Bateman.
Suffered nervous breakdowns after one of which she destroyed her paintings.
Connection to Bloomsbury
Henry Sass’s Art Academy.
Networking in Bloomsbury with Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Sisters.
Female Networks
Fellow artists Jane Benham, Margaret Gillies; Pre Raphaelite women artists incl Eliza Bridell (Tottie) Fox; Langham Place Group incl: close friend Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon.
Angela Burdett Coutts.
Written works include:
Serialised stories and articles which she, at times, illustrated.
1853 Sisters in Art published in Illustrated Exhibitor.
1853 An Art Student in Munich, a collection of previously published articles.
1857 Light in the Valley by Camilla Newton Crosland included a selection of Howitt’s spirit drawings.
1883 Pioneers of Spiritual Reformation consisting of biographical sketches of Dr Justinus Kerner and her father William Howitt.
1884 Aurora: A Volume of Verse; co-authored with her husband, fellow spiritualist, Alaric Alfred Watts.
Further reading: