William Morris and Friends

William Morris died a hundred years ago, on 3 October 1896, aged sixty-two. Artist, writer and reformer, he is remembered today for his wallpaper designs, perhaps for some poems or as the author of a Utopian socialist novel News from Nowhere. But the revolution in art and design which occurred in Britain in the second half of last century would have been different without the genius of William Morris and that of his friends. Morris worked with many colleagues, happily exchanging ideas and sparking the enthusiasm of others.

Morris and his circle belonged to the second generation of artists inspired by medieval, especially Gothic art. The revival of Gothic style began as a revolt against the ordered, rational neo-Classicism which dominated the eighteenth century. In Britain, neo-Gothic was claimed as a national style, seen in the medieval settings of Sir Walter Scott's novels, the Arthurian poetry of Tennyson, and used by architects Barry and Pugin for the re-building of the Houses of Parliament in the 1840s. It is central to John Ruskin's critique of the debased art of the industrial age.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a semi-secret group of painters and poets which included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, W. Holman Hunt and J.E. Millais, was formed in 1848, when Morris was fourteen years old. They rejected the conventions of Renaissance art from Raphael onwards in favour of truth to nature and imagination. Like Ruskin, Morris admired the Pre-Raphaelites' work, although he followed Ruskin's more robust view of the Middle Ages. Both men idealised the era as a time of craftspeople who created beauty through their labour and skill.

Hunt's illustration of The Lady of Shalott 1857 for 'The Moxon Tennyson' evokes a romantic medieval setting with Gothic double arches on the reflected colonnade. But the statuesque figure, hair unravelling rhythmically, is more a Pre-Raphaelite woman looped about with yarn in a studio than an historically accurate rendition of the court of King Arthur. The image is imbued with Tennyson's Victorian tendency to prettify the past.

William Morris assembled around him collaborators for his missions. From 1856 — after finishing university at Oxford and cutting short his apprenticeship with the architect G.E. Street — Morris, with Edward Burne-Jones, began to design and decorate furniture in the 'medieval' manner. His lifelong friendship and admiration for Burne-Jones was mutual, even when they disagreed on aesthetic, personal or political matters. In 1857 Rossetti asked several of his young admirers to help with the murals he was painting for the Oxford University Union. It was here that Morris, rich through inherited wealth, encountered and began to court Jane Burden, the daughter of a stable-hand. She personified the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of tragic beauty. Two years later Morris married Janey, as she was known.

In 1859 Morris commissioned Philip Webb (whom he had met in Street's office) to design and build the Red House at Upton in Kent. The group of friends enjoyed creating furnishings for the house based on the English rural vernacular. The success of this project led to the establishment in 1861 of a commercial venture: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. — known as 'the firm'. This loose fellowship of artists and craftspeople seemed to be the realisation of Morris's dream of a community dedicated to creating a more beautiful environment through the integration of the arts into everyday life. In the early stages, the partners and their associates concentrated on providing painted wall decoration, embroidery, tableware, furniture, stained glass and tiles.

Although many people contributed designs to the firm over the years, Morris's active participation in all its operations ensured that his signature is evident in every aspect of its output. The 'Sussex' chair c. 1865 was one of the firm's most popular products — perhaps because each chair cost only seven shillings.

The Sussex range, based on traditional rush-seated models, continued in production for more than fifty years. It vindicated Morris's views on design and craftsmanship, being simple and practical. By the 1870s Morris, Marshall, Faulkner 8 Co. was a successful and lucrative enterprise. In 1875, amidst some acrimony, the partnership was dissolved and Morris became the sole proprietor of the firm, now known as Morris and Co.

The challenge of providing original decorative schemes on commission inspired Morris to design many wallpapers and textiles. An innate ability to unify form, colour and pattern made him the most innovative and outstanding pattern designer of his generation. His use of plants, flowers and birds was not purely imitative nor overly conventionalised. The swirling branches of the willow tree in his wallpaper Willow boughs 1887 demonstrate an ability to harness the inherent dynamism of the subject within a repeat pattern.

In the middle of the 1860s Morris and Burne-Jones began their ambitious but abortive project of illustrating, with 300 woodcuts, Morris's voluminous tales in verse, The Earthly Paradise, published from 1868 to 1870. In all, about fifty small wooden blocks were cut, most of them by Morris. Cupid flying to Psyche c. 1865—67 is broadly cut with parallel hatching to provide the ground. In this image Burne-Jones compresses the winged figure of Cupid within the top of the frame, allowing love's messenger to float above the landscape far below.

Morris was deeply critical of what he saw as the debased products of undiscriminating industrial production. He experimented with long forgotten techniques of dyeing, printing and weaving, not simply as ends in themselves but as a means of investing his textiles with an integrity of decoration, material, technique and manufacture. Bird 1878 was designed to hang on the drawing room walls of Kelmscott House, his Hammersmith home on the north bank of the Thames. It was one of the first double-weave woollen cloths produced after the introduction of hand-driven Jacquard looms into the firm's workshops. The synthesis of pattern, weave, colour and material in this design, with its almost three-dimensional qualities, is typical of Morris at his best.

The difference Morris made shows in the work of the many individuals touched by his infectious enthusiasm and commitment to raising the standard of the applied arts. The enlightened approach of Morris and the firm to the design and execution of their works was extraordinary. Morris himself had profound respect for the collaborative nature of making things, as he outlined in a lecture of 1892:

These words are borne out in Morris’s relationship with his favourite embroiderer Catherine Holiday. He trusted her artistic judgement, allowing her to choose her own colours and stitches. Like many of the associates of Morris & Co., Holiday also conducted her own business independently of the firm. Although the design for the Wall Hanging 1887 was drawn out of the firm’s workshops by her husband, the painter and stained glass designer Henry Holiday, the piece is embroidered in her distinctive style.

Perhaps William De Morgan is the designer whose work comes closest to th sheer exuberance of Morris’s flat pattern designs. An interest in decorating ceramics, initiated through the firm, led him to establish his own company and workshop n 1872. De Morgan shared his mentor’s conviction that the designer should be intimately involved in the craft process, and he determined to every aspect of ceramics. He developed brilliant ‘Persian’ colours, as he called them, and revived the fine art of lustre ware.

Morris’s love of Islamic art was shared by De Morgan, an enthusiasm evident in his Peacock and serpent vase, made between 1888 and 1897. The traditional amphora shape flaunts a peacock on one face, while a striking serpent coils its way up the other side amidst an abundance of life: birds. lizards, butterflies, insects, plants and flowers. Bold hues of turquoise, bright greens, yellow, aubergine and iron red enliven it further.

The glassmaking firm James Powell & Sons, the leading producer of stained glass in Britain in the nineteenth century, was Morris & Co.'s main supplier for stained glass commissions and table glass. Their long and close association is evident in the glassworks' own designs, culminating in the creation of a number of beautiful, boldly-shaped. yet almost evanescent vases. Their commitment to researching ancient techniques while developing new ideas is evident in the adventurous hand-fluted Vase c. 1890 which opalesces from yellow to cream, shot with blue highlights.

As a founder in 1877 of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — 'Anti-scrape', he called it — Morris acted in the interests of both past and future. His passion for historical truth meant that he opposed the Victorian desire to 'improve' churches by over-zealous restoration. He saw architecture as a legacy, a true record of history in trust for the generations to come.

In the 1880s Morris moved towards radical socialism. As a lecturer on art and society, political agitator, member of the Socialist League, editor of The Commonweal, and founder of the Hammersmith Socialist Society, he now came into contact with intellectuals and workers other than those he employed. He understood the contradiction of being a capitalist revolutionary, but used his business profits to subsidise his socialist activities. His views were original: that communism was a necessary condition for art, and that in a re-organised socialist society all work done well and with enjoyment would produce art. Morris went far beyond the reformist zeal of Ruskin, to embrace Marxism and non-parliamentary socialism.

As well as the example set by Morris and his friends, their beliefs about truth in materials, appropriate means, and the equal status of all the arts became benchmarks for the Arts and Crafts movement. The workshops and guilds established during the 1880s embody Morris's ideas of collaboration and pleasure in work. They served as a means of enriching the lives of designers and craftspeople while improving the products of their combined labours. C.R. Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft, perhaps the most admired of these early associations, was active from 1888 until 1908.

Morris was again inspired to make books after hearing his friend Emery Walker lecture to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1888. He was always fascinated by medieval illuminated manuscripts and early printed books, and practised the art of calligraphy for decades before deciding to design and print his own books at the Kelmscott Press, established in Hammersmith in 1891.

All the intellectual, physical and design elements that went into making books were considered: the texts, ink, paper, binding, typeface, spacing, decoration and illustration. Of the fifty-three works (in sixty-six volumes) published by the Kelmscott Press, about a third were medieval writings, especially William Caxton's translations, and nearly half were Morris's novels and verse. Most of the rest were by the poets of his century — Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Tennyson, Rossetti and Swinburne — while two were extracts from Ruskin's books, Gothic Architecture and The Nature of Gothic.

Excellence was always Morris's aim. He thought that the best books were from fifteenth-century Italy and Germany. He favoured a very stiff German ink, made of lamp-black and linseed oil, and pure linen paper. A few copies of the books were usually printed onto vellum — specifically made from the skins of calves less than six weeks old. There were two kinds of bindings: vellum with hand-dyed silk ties, or blue-grey paper boards with quarter linen binding.

Designing new typefaces was made easier after Emery Walker, in his lecture, screened blown-up photographs to illustrate early examples of printing. Morris realised he could draw letters on a much larger scale and reduce them photographically for casting. He wanted to rescue Gothic lettering from the charge of unreadability, and so created the Troy alphabet, which was also used in a smaller pitch called Chaucer. By manipulating the spacing between lines, by varying the margins, and looking at each double-page opening of a book as a unit, he could make dense text clear and easy to read. His Roman characters, the Golden typeface, were used for contemporary works.

Four artists provided wood-engraved illustrations for the Kelmscott Press. Edward Burne-Jones contributed his images to thirteen books, while Walter Crane, A.J. Gaskin and C.M. Gere each illustrated one. Given Morris's views on authenticity, the process of converting Burne-Jones's light pencil drawings for engraving is illuminating. Emery Walker photographed the works and Robert Catterson-Smith re-drew the lines in ink. They were rephotographed onto wood blocks then cut by professional engravers (usually by William Hooper) and finally printed on hand presses. The end result, especially the eighty-seven illustrations for The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer 1896, justifies the mixture of mechanical and craft means.

Morris is often regarded as a machine-hating Luddite who despised the technology of his time. But he was willing to use machines if they enabled him to be more efficient and did not demean their users. From the Jacquard looms which wove Morris & Co.'s woollens, to the electrotypes and photographic processes used to produce the volumes of the Kelmscott Press, Morris saw machines as his useful tools, but never his master.

Architecture was the most important of the arts for Morris, the foundation of all others; it is appropriate that the metaphor often used for that prodigious volume, the Kelmscott edition of Chaucer, is 'a cathedral of a book'.

Burne-Jones, identifying himself with his illustrations, said he: ‘loved to be snugly cased in borderes and buttressed up by the vast initials – and once or twice when I have no big letter under me, I fell tottery and weak; if you drag me out of my encasings it will be like tearing a statue out of its niche nd putting it in a museum’.² He contributed stately, sometimes almost static, processional images of an idealised medieval world. While he voided depicting the bawdy, boisterous side of Chaucer’s writings, Burne-Jones’s drawings enrich the pages of a superb work of art, crafted lovingly by many people.

The distinctive look of Kelmscott books comes primarily from the original typefaces, ornate initial letters and words, decorative title pages and intricate, swirling borders invented and drawn by Morris. While these designs were based on plant and flower forms, perhaps their source is not only direct observation of the natural world, but more the way in which artists of the past have used nature for patterning and ornament. Morris was a genius of two-dimensional design. The sinuous curves and variation of motif, so apparent in the repeating patterns of colourful wallpapers, curtains and embroideries, were transformed into the rich sobriety of black ink printed onto off-white paper, with occasional touches of red for the books of the Kelmscott Press.

R. Lethaby described how Morris drew his borders freehand, with one saucer of Indian ink and another of Chinese white. After a slight indication of the pattern in pencil, he would alternate two brushes, loaded with black or white pigment, to draw pattern and ground. Mistakes and new thoughts could be easily painted over. For Morris, the process was enjoyable:

In the art of the beautiful book, Morris's principles stand almost unaltered. The private press movement spread across continents, and flourishes today. It is one of numerous memorials to William Morris, whose genius lay in the dissemination of his many passions. For Morris and his friends, art meant the synthesis of work and pleasure. While their goal of re-making the world proved impossible, they tried to live the dream of a community of artists and workers joined in productive, satisfying labour. Naturally there were disappointments, but their achievements are manifold and remarkable. Morris is remembered today due to the example he set, because of the friends he gathered around him, and most of all for the inspiration he engendered.

Christine Dixon

International Prints, Drawings & Illustrated Books

Roger Leong

International Decorative Arts, National Gallery of Australia