Anna Howitt Watts

Born 1824 Died 1884

Anna Mary Howitt Watts (1824-84) was an artist, feminist, member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle and a pioneering mediumistic artist, arguably the first in Britain. Spiritualistic activities became a family affair at the beginning of the movement in the 1850s, possibly after suffering the loss of Anna’s brother Claude. It also offered Anna solace after the personal heartache of a broken engagement and dealing with the dismissive critique from the eminent art critic of the day, John Ruskin. He was reported to have offered Anna the advice of staying with still life after seeing her grand historical painting, Boadicea Brooding over her Wrongs, a work of art that showed Anna’s bold nature, but was possibly conceived as a woman artist punching above her weight at that time.

Anna had struggled to receive the artistic training that was so freely available to men in Victorian England and undeterred travelled to Germany where she was welcomed at the studio of Wilhelm von Kaulbach. Anna returned writing about the experience in her book A Student in Munich which discussed her wish for women to rise up in the art world as Sisters in Art. One of these ‘sisters’ was the artist and fellow feminist Barbara Bodichon. Together, and with several other like-minded women, they formed the Langham Place Group which campaigned for improvements in women’s rights and became one Britain’s first organised women’s movements.

From 1856 Anna began to create spirit drawings, mostly on fine tracing paper. A selection were
published in a small book called Light in the Valley written in 1857 by Anna’s friend and fellow Spiritualist Camilla Newton Crosland. It contained some of the earliest examples of mediumistic art and included the following explanation: “The first drawings were very crude indeed, like the uncertain tottering lines of a child, and also singularly resembling the designs of the very early Italian painters, – heads of Christ, angels, and curious female figures seated within spheres and hearts; and always these drawings were accompanied with strange ornaments of spiral and shell forms, with dots and scroll-like ciphers, which I thought odd at the time, but only months afterwards, when accidentally referring to them, discovered to be the first undeveloped attempts at writing one of the ‘spirit languages’”. signed “Comfort” 1857. Comfort was Anna and with this book a new genre of art was born.

Anna Howitt Watts’ artworks can be found in The College of Psychic Studies in London of which she was a founder member in 1884.

Selected Exhibitions
2025 Tranceducers: Art of Visionaries, Mediums and Automatists, GPS Gallery, Soho, London
2022 Creative Spirits at The College of Psychic Studies, London
2019 World Receivers, Lenbachhaus, Germany