Watt, Amy

As Amy Maulby Biggs, she was born at Plymouth, Devon in 1900.  She studied at Plymouth College of Art under Fred. Shelley and then at St Martin's School of Art where she met her future husband John Millar Watt, who attended the same evening classes and they both worked for advertising agencies as staff artists.

In 1921 Amy was an 'art student designer' boarding at 66 Fortune Green Road, Hampstead, London and she married in 1923 and moved to Dedham, Essex where they designed and built a modern house and studio overlooking Dedham Vale, to where Alfred Munnings and his wife Violet, were frequent visitors. Amy devoted her energies to a considerable output of landscape and flower paintings, using a sense of colour, design and often scale, that was self-assuredly modern,

yet worked out on traditional lines.

A member of the Ipswich Art Club 1926-1935, but had exhibited in 1923 'Elizabethan Window' and exhibiting from The Studio, Dedham, Essex in 1927, six works oils 'Rhododendrons', 'Mary in the Garden', 'Primulas', 'Country Bunch', 'Felgate's Farm' and watercolour 'The Arbutus Tree' and in 1933 as Mrs J. Millar Watt from Corner House, Dedham, three oils 'Autumn Bunch', 'Tulips' and 'Blue and Silver'. About 1935 she moved to St Ives, Cornwall, taking the Chy-an-Chy Studio overlooking the harbour. She exhibited 19 works at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions 1929-1953, the five exhibits 1938-1939 were all St Ives harbour scenes, also exhibiting at the Paris Salon, gaining an honourable mention, also showing in local shows in Suffolk, Essex, and St Ives.

In 1939 the Watts moved briefly to Crediton, Devon but returned to St Ives during the Second World War after which, she and her husband, made their home at Chelsea. Amy Maulby Millar Watts was of 8 Walton Street, Chelsea when she died at St Thomas's Hospital, Lambeth,