About

Veronica Franklin Gould FRSA

VeronicArts is led by art historian and biographer, Veronica Franklin Gould. President of Arts 4 Dementia (A4D), she founded the charity in 2011 to develop re-energising learning and participation programmes, with training in partnership with arts venues to empower individuals and family carers to preserve their brain health through arts.

Arts 4 Dementia 2009-19 – Inspired by the London Olympics 2012

Working in association with universities, inviting arts and medical students to interact with participants for mutual benefit and to help spread the practice, her aim has been for patients to be referred to weekly artistic stimulation on diagnosis, as cognitive rehabilation and reablement.

A4D Social Prescribing Programme 2019-21

The introduction of surgery-based link workers spurred Veronica’s campaign for social prescribing to re-energising arts to be offered to patients at the earliest possible opportunity, to protect against isolating strain in the lead-up to diagnosis and preserve their brain health and resilience in the community for years longer.

Awards and nominations

VeronicArts 2022–24

Veronica runs Global Arts for Brain Health webinars, initially in association with Sir Muir Gray, Director of the Optimal Ageing Programme at The University Oxford, reaching 40 countries around the world. She presents papers nationally and internationally to help spread Arts for Brain Health practice.

Charitable roles

Veronica is President of Arts for Dementia, Trustee of The Amber Trust, Vice-President of Decibels (Music for the Deaf) and on the advisory boards of the Global Arts in Medicine Fellowships and British Society for Lifestyle Medicine.

Art historical background:

After an early career in art publishing, training in fine and decorative arts at Christie’s of London, Veronica researched the lives and curated the centenary exhibitions of Mary Seton Watts (1849-1938) Unsung Heroine of the Art Nouveau (Watts Gallery 1998) and of her husband The Vision of G. F. Watts (2004), writing his biography G. F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian (Yale University Press, 2004), and curating the bicentenary exhibition of the Victorian poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, Tennyson at Farringford (2009). Veronica paused her double biography intertwining Watts’s two wives, the teenage actress Ellen Terry and the craftswoman Mary Fraser Tytler to set up A4D and is now resuming their double biography in tandem with her Global Arts for Brain Health webinar programme.

NEW BIOGRAPHY Valiant Seton: Mary Fraser Tytler of Aldourie

Married to the world-famous Victorian artist George Frederic Watts, Mary was a suffragist and designer with a curious artistic interest in Death. As creator of the Watts Mortuary Chapel, she was a pioneer of the Celtic Revival, who elevated the status of craftswomen on both sides of the Atlantic.

In this first biography to focus on Mary’s life before marriage, Valiant Seton examines the pivotal role her Fraser Tytler ancestors played in Scotland’s literary heritage, her upbringing in a remote highland castle, the flamboyance of her decorative art and her entry into the epicentre of the English artworld. A disastrous love affair in Rome tormented the young artist for years, punctuating her march into the heart of her ‘painter of painters.’ 

Valiant Seton is a compelling account of Mary’s turbulent life and her emergence from her aristocratic chrysalis into a social reforming craftswoman and life-partner extraordinaire of England’s Michelangelo.

Colin Ford CBE ‘A revelatory book! As an expert on Julia Margaret Cameron, I really learned a lot about her circle and her artistic contemporaries.”

Hilary Calvert ‘Truly a tour de force. Mary’s early life detailed as never before.’

HSH Dr Donatus, Prince of Hohenzollern ‘A distinguished contribution to Scottish cultural history.’