Compton Potters' Arts Guild

The Compton Potters' Arts Guild was a pottery, founded by and based at the Surrey home of Scottish artist, Mary Fraser Tytler.

A follower of the Home Arts and Industries Association, set up by Earl Brownlow in 1885 to encourage handicrafts among the lower classes, Fraser-Tytler, the wife of Victorian era painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts, had offered to design and build a new mortuary chapel when the council in Compton, Surrey were developing a new cemetery. Setting up a local evening class, led by Louis Deuchars, Mary got them designing and modelling designs guided by her and influenced by friends and crafts people: Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, Alexander Fisher, William de Morgan and Phoebe Traquair.

The resultant Romanesque/Gothic revival exterior of the Watts Mortuary Chapel aroused such interest, that before work on the polychrome interior had started, Watts had set up permanent Arts and Crafts communities in both Compton and her home-town of Aldourie, Scotland. The outputs of the Compton group resulted in the formation in 1899 of the Compton Potters' Arts Guild.