William Morris
see also collection:
Morris William
- designer
born March 24, 1834, Walthamstow, near
London, Eng.
died Oct. 3, 1896, Hammersmith, near London
English designer, craftsman, poet, and early
socialist, whose designs for furniture,
fabrics, stained glass, wallpaper, and other
decorative arts generated the Arts and
Crafts movement in England and
revolutionized Victorian taste.
Education and early career
Morris was born in an Essex village on the
southern edge of Epping Forest, a member of
a large and well-to-do family. From his
preparatory school, he went at age 13 to
Marlborough College. A schoolfellow
described him at this time as “a thick-set,
strong-looking boy, with a high colour and
black curly hair, good-natured and kind, but
with a fearful temper.” Morris later said
that at Marlborough he learned “next to
nothing…for indeed next to nothing was
taught.” As in later life, he learned only
what he wanted to learn.
In 1853 Morris went to Exeter College at
the University of Oxford, where he met
Edward Jones (later the painter and designer
Burne-Jones), who was to become his lifelong
friend. Both Morris and Jones became deeply
affected by the Oxford movement within the
Church of England, and it was assumed that
they would become clergymen. Nevertheless,
it was the writings of art critic John
Ruskin on the social and moral basis of
architecture (particularly the chapter “On
the Nature of Gothic” in The Stones of
Venice) that came to Morris “with the force
of a revelation.” After taking a degree in
1856, he entered the Oxford office of the
Gothic Revivalist architect G.E. Street. In
the same year he financed the first 12
monthly issues of The Oxford and Cambridge
Magazine, where many of those poems appeared
that, two years later, were reprinted in his
remarkable first published work, The Defence
of Guenevere and Other Poems.
Visits with Street and Burne-Jones to
Belgium and northern France, where he first
saw the 15th-century paintings of Hans
Memling and Jan and Hubert Van Eyck and the
cathedrals of Amiens, Chartres, and Rouen,
confirmed Morris in his love of medieval
art. It was at this time that he came under
the powerful influence of the Pre-Raphaelite
painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who
persuaded him to give up architecture for
painting and enrolled him among the band of
friends who were decorating the walls of the
Oxford Union with scenes from Arthurian
legend based on Le Morte Darthur by the
15th-century English writer Sir Thomas
Malory. Only one easel painting by Morris
survives: La Belle Iseult, or Queen
Guenevere (1858). His model was Jane Burden,
the beautiful, enigmatic daughter of an
Oxford groom. He married her in 1859, but
the marriage was to prove a source of
unhappiness to both. Morris appears at this
time, in the memoirs of the painter Val
Prinsep, as “a short square man with
spectacles and a vast mop of dark hair.” It
was observed “how decisive he was: how
accurate, without any effort or formality:
what an extraordinary power of observation
lay at the base of many of his casual or
incidental remarks.” From 1856 to 1859
Morris shared a studio with Burne-Jones in
London’s Red Lion Square, for which he
designed, according to Rossetti, “some
intensely medieval furniture.”
After his marriage, Morris commissioned
his friend the architect Philip Webb, whom
he had originally met in Street’s office, to
build the Red House at Bexleyheath (so
called because it was built of red brick
when the fashion was for stucco villas). It
was during the furnishing and decorating of
this house by Morris and his friends that
the idea came to them of founding an
association of “fine art workmen,” which in
April 1861 became the firm of Morris,
Marshall, Faulkner & Company, with premises
in Red Lion Square. The other members of the
firm were Ford Madox Brown, Rossetti, Webb,
and Burne-Jones. At the International
Exhibition of 1862 at South Kensington they
exhibited stained glass, furniture, and
embroideries. This led to commissions to
decorate the new churches then being built
by G.F. Bodley, notably St.
Martin’s-on-the-Hill at Scarborough. The
apogee of the firm’s decorative work is the
magnificent series of stained-glass windows
designed during the next decade by
Burne-Jones for Jesus College Chapel,
Cambridge, the ceiling being painted by
Morris and Webb. The designs for these
windows came to Morris uncoloured, and it
was he who chose the colours and put in the
lead lines. He also designed many other
windows himself, for both domestic and
ecclesiastical use.
Two daughters, Jenny and May, were born
in 1861 and 1862, and altogether the five
years spent at Red House were the happiest
of Morris’s life. After a serious attack of
rheumatic fever, brought on by overwork, he
moved in 1865 to Bloomsbury in London. The
greater part of his new house was given over
to the firm’s workshops—an arrangement that,
combined with her husband’s boisterous
manners and Rossetti’s infatuation with her,
reduced Jane to a state of neurotic
invalidism. Morris’s first wallpaper
designs, “Trellis,” “Daisy,” and “Fruit,” or
“Pomegranate,” belong to 1862–64; he did not
arrive at his mature style until 10 years
later, with the “Jasmine” and “Marigold”
papers.
Iceland and socialism
As a poet, Morris first achieved fame and
success with the romantic narrative The Life
and Death of Jason (1867), which was soon
followed by The Earthly Paradise (1868–70),
a series of narrative poems based on
classical and medieval sources. The best
parts of The Earthly Paradise are the
introductory poems on the months, in which
Morris reveals his personal unhappiness. A
sterner spirit informs his principal poetic
achievement, the epic Story of Sigurd the
Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876),
written after a prolonged study of the sagas
(medieval prose narratives) read by Morris
in the original Old Norse. The exquisitely
illuminated A Book of Verse, telling once
more of hopeless love and dedicated to
Georgina Burne-Jones, belongs to 1870.
In 1871 Morris and Rossetti took a joint
lease on the Elizabethan manor house of
Kelmscott in Oxfordshire. In the same year
Morris paid his first visit to Iceland, and
the journal he kept of his travels contains
some of his most vigorous descriptive
writing. He returned to Iceland in 1873. The
shared tenancy of Kelmscott, however, was
never a success, and, after the final
breakdown of his health in 1874, Rossetti
left the house for good, to Morris’s great
relief. The following year the firm was
reorganized under his sole proprietorship as
Morris & Company. In 1875 Morris also began
his revolutionary experiments with vegetable
dyes, which, after the removal in 1881 of
the firm to larger premises at Merton Abbey
in Surrey, resulted in its finest printed
and woven fabrics, carpets, and tapestries.
In 1877 Morris gave his first public
lecture, The Decorative Arts (later called
The Lesser Arts), and his first collection
of lectures, Hopes and Fears for Art,
appeared in 1882. In 1877 he also founded
the Society for the Protection of Ancient
Buildings in an attempt to combat the
drastic methods of restoration then being
carried out on the cathedrals and parish
churches of Great Britain.
The Morris family moved into Kelmscott
House (named after their country house in
Oxfordshire), at Hammersmith, in 1879. Five
years later Morris joined Henry Mayers
Hyndman’s Democratic (later Social
Democratic) Federation and began his
tireless tours of industrial areas to spread
the gospel of socialism. He was
considerately treated by the authorities,
even when leading a banned demonstration to
London’s Trafalgar Square on “Bloody Sunday”
(November 13, 1887), when the police,
supported by troops, cleared the square of
demonstrators. On this occasion he marched
with the playwright George Bernard Shaw at
his side. But by this time Morris had
quarreled with the autocratic Hyndman
Federation and formed the Socialist League,
with its own publication, The Commonweal, in
which his two finest romances, A Dream of
John Ball (1886–87) and News from Nowhere
(1890), an idyllic vision of a socialist
rural utopia, appeared. Subsequently, he
founded the Hammersmith Socialist Society,
which held weekly lectures in the coach
house next door to Kelmscott House, as well
as open-air meetings in different parts of
London.
The Kelmscott Press
The Kelmscott Press was started in 1891,
with the printer and type designer Emery
Walker as typographic adviser, and between
that year and 1898 the press produced 53
titles in 66 volumes. Morris designed three
type styles for his press: Golden type,
modeled on that of Nicolas Jenson, the
15th-century French printer; Troy type, a
gothic font on the model of the early German
printers of the 15th century; and Chaucer
type, a smaller variant of Troy, in which
The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer was printed
during the last years of Morris’s life. One
of the greatest examples of the art of the
printed book, Chaucer is the most ornate of
the Kelmscott publications. Most of the
other Kelmscott books were plain and simple,
for Morris observed that 15th-century books
were “always beautiful by force of the mere
typography.”
Death and assessment
A sea voyage to Norway in the summer of 1896
failed to revive Morris’s flagging energies,
and he died that autumn after returning
home, worn out by the multiplicity of his
activities. He was buried in the Kelmscott
churchyard beneath a simple gravestone
designed by Webb.
Morris is now regarded as a modern and
visionary thinker, though he turned away
from what he called “the dull squalor of
civilization” to romance, myth, and epic.
Following Ruskin, Morris defined beauty in
art as the result of man’s pleasure in his
work and asked, “Unless people care about
carrying on their business without making
the world hideous, how can they care about
Art?” To Morris, art included the whole
man-made environment.
In his own time William Morris was most
widely known as the author of The Earthly
Paradise and for his designs for wallpapers,
textiles, and carpets. Since the mid-20th
century Morris has been celebrated as a
designer and craftsman. Future generations
may esteem him more as a social and moral
critic, a pioneer of the society of
equality.
Philip Prichard Henderson
Ed.
