William Watts (engraver)

The son of a master silk weaver in Moorfields, London, Watts was born early in 1752.

[1] Watts sold up at his house at Kemp's Row, Chelsea, London and went to Italy, reaching Naples in September 1786.

Interested by the French Revolution, and went to Paris in 1793, where some of his views of English country seats were engraved in colours by Laurent Guyot.

He invested most of the property that he had inherited from his father, with his own earnings, in the French funds; and all of it was confiscated (though he recovered some of it after the peace in 1815).

In 1814 he purchased a small property at Cobham, Surrey, where he died on 7 December 1851, after having been blind for some years, within a few months of his hundredth birthday.