Watts was born in Birmingham and studied at the Birmingham School of Art, moving to Liverpool when he was 21. There he became a member of the Liverpool Academy of Arts and of the Royal Cambrian Academy. His wider reputation notwithstanding, he kept to his Birmingham roots, becoming also a member of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists and of the Birmingham Art Circle. He preferred watercolour to oil and often painted in the Wirral, Snowdonia and the Peak District. Christopher Newall described Watts’s combination of ‘meticulous detail with a sense of atmosphere’ in Victorian Landscape Watercolours (1992, p 186). When this picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy, it was noticed as being ‘exceptionally good, fine in quality, and answering its title thoroughly’ (Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 21 May 1908, p 5).