Constance Mary Pott (22 January 1862 – 18 January 1957), RE, was an English printmaker and teacher active during the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century. She became technical and teaching assistant to the teacher and printmaker Sir Frank Short at the Royal College of Art from 1902 until Short's retirement in 1924. In her day she was recognized as a pioneer in the etching revival, for her dynamic, versatile mastery of technique and line, for the spacious evocation of landscape in her plates, and for her formal professional occupation, all exceptional achievements by any standards, but more especially so in their combining in her to overcome societal disapproval of professions for women. As a teacher she had a powerful and acknowledged influence upon a whole generation of engravers (including several prominent women etchers) who passed through the College. However, she long outlived the fashion of that movement, and her central role in it was for a time almost forgotten. Examples of her own works, principally etchings, are held in leading national collections, and appear in the salerooms. She is sometimes confused with her mother, Constance Mary née Fearon, Mrs Henry Pott (1833-1915).
Biography
Origins
Pott was born in West Wickham, Kent (now in the borough of Bromley), in 1862, the third of at least nine children of Henry Pott, stockbroker, and his wife Constance Mary (née Fearon). She grew up in a Victorian upper-middle-class family home in Cornwall Gardens, South Kensington, next-door to the architect Thomas Cundy III. Her father Henry Pott was a son of the proprietor of Pott's Vinegar Factory in Southwark. Her mother Mrs. Henry Pott (1833-1915), a granddaughter of the developer James Burton, was an early advocate of the Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship. In December 1885 Mrs Pott founded the Francis Bacon Society: she had published Bacon's manuscript collection of private notes as The Promus of Formularies and Elegancies in 1883 (in which she found parallels to Shakespearean expressions), and wrote several books about him, including Francis Bacon and his Secret Society (1891), linking Bacon to the Shakespeare authorship and to the Rosicrucian movement, and Quite a Gentleman, an interpretation of esoteric paper marks of the Baconian period. Mrs Pott was the subject of an admired mezzotint portrait by her daughter.
South Kensington
The South Kensington Museum evolved during the middle and later years of the nineteenth century, with collections in science and applied arts forming a resource for education and training in the rapidly expanding productive industries. Training schools for artists and craftsmen arose around the country under a syllabus moderated by the South Kensington system. The School of Design founded at Somerset House in 1837 was relocated to the Museum as the "National Art Training School". During the 1880s and 1890s the Art and Science collections were placed under separate directorships, leading eventually to the formation of the London Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum as separate institutions.
The Art Training School was renamed the Royal College of Art in 1896, its emphasis increasingly upon the practice of art and design. In advance of this change, the School was attracting many students drawn more to fine art than to design. Constance Mary Pott attended the engraving class taught by the artist Sir Frank Short in 1891, laying the foundation of her artistic career, and of her professional association with Short. The national census of that year found her living at the Rectory of Northill, Bedfordshire, where her uncle, the hymn-writer the Revd. Francis Pott (1832-1909), an associate of the Bacon Society, had been rector since 1866. He was obliged to resign his benefice in 1891 owing to loss of hearing.