Little Holland House, 40 Beeches Avenue, Carshalton SM5 3LW

George Frederick Watts was born in Marylebone, London in 1817. He began sculpting at the age of ten and enrolled at the Royal Academy at age 18. in 1843, Watts’s drawing Caractacus one first place in a mural competition at the new Houses of Parliament in Westminster, which made him known to the public. In the 1860s, Watts’s works began to show influence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Of all of his artistic subjects, Ellen terry seems to inspire Watt’s work more than anyone else (Franklin 33). It wasn’t long before they wed, on February 20th, 1864. The difference in age was almost thirty years, with Terry on their wedding day just shy of seventeen years old and he was forty-six. Watts’s colleague William Holman Hunt designed Terry’s wedding dress, a grey-brown renaissance style gown that had sleeves latticed with black velvet (Franklin 38). Their marriage lasted only 18 months but he did not  divorced Terry until 1877 (Walton 83). He remarried, to Mary Fraser-Tytler, a Scottish Designer and potter, at the age of 69. Although in public he maintained his distance from Terry, he was in regular communication with her through written correspondence. He moved to London in 1881 and set up a studio at his home, Little Holland House. Watts contributed to The Pageant.