William Morris

APU

BRITISH VISUAL CULTURE AND SOCIETY YESTERDAY AND TODAY

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE STUDIES MODULE: AEH1021

ESSAY TITLE: DISCUSS THE CONTRIBUTION OF WILLIAM MORRIS TO ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

SID: 0012392/01

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William Morris was born in Essex in March 1834, in a small village called Walthamstow. His mother was Emma Shelton. His father, William Morris senior was a rich businessman who died in 1847. He became rich as soon as he invested in a mining company, in Devonshire. William Morris had four sisters and four brothers. Although he hadn’t many contacts with his brothers and sisters, William Morris had a happy childhood with many comforts. The village where they lived was picturesque and the young William loved the nature, which influenced him in his life and especially in his art. But above all he loved everything that had a medieval spirit. The education he followed, was the standard middle class education of his age. His first school was Marlborough College, which was a public school with no interest for Morris. His only interest came from the buildings and the monuments of the town. In the evenings he used to create stories about knights and fairies. In 1985 he was sent to Exeter College, in Oxford, to study to become a clergyman. The town was beautiful and he then started to develop his awareness for medieval art and architecture. At that period of his life, he met very important persons that influenced him for the rest of his life. The first one he met as soon as he arrived was Edward Burne-Jones (Naylor 2000:22). Morris was a very anxious spirit, but this anxiety was creative for him from an early age. With the help of Byrne-Jones and others he created a brotherhood and in 1855 they launched the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. Unfortunately it lasted only one year, because only Morris was occupied with the finances of the magazine (Naylor 2000:22). In the creation of the magazine helped a lot that Morris, Byrne-Jones and others were studying poetry and they had already started developing their own styles. Furthermore, in the college he used to read Ruskin’s Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice. He was extremely fascinated with Ruskin, because he wrote about the connection between art and society. As Ruskin, so Morris didn’t like the way that England was changing. He saw his peaceful, picturesque country to change into an industrial chaos. In the same way he saw art becoming a commercial product and he tried to change it with his own contribution. He also believed that the products should be beautiful and affordable for everybody and each design should be unique. On the other hand the mass, commercial products are of bad quality, they do not promote art 2

and moreover they destroy the craft traditions. Besides, these were the main beliefs of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which was established during the nineteenth century in Britain. Meanwhile, Morris traveled in France, where he visited some cathedrals and developed an interest in architecture. So, after graduating from Oxford, he had himself apprenticed to G.E. Street, with whom he started work in January 1856 (Bradley 1978:15). However, he wasn’t very happy with the work he was doing, because he didn’t create anything new on his own, he was copying a drawing of the doorway of St Augustine’s church in Canterbury. In order to create something genuine on his own he abandons his apprenticeship for the sake of painting. With his friend Edward Byrne-Jones he moved into rooms in Red Lion Square and because the rooms were unfurnished they started designing their own furniture (Naylor 2000:31). During that period of his life, he heard about a new movement The Pre-Raphaelites, whose leader was Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The interest was that The Pre-Raphaelites were painting according to the style that was used in the Middle Ages. They had denied the new commercial art and they were painting in a more humanized approach. Finally, in 1856 Morris and Byrne-Jones met Rossetti and they started painting in the style of The PreRaphaelites with Rossetti as a tutor (Bradley 1978:16). In 1857 Rossetti gathered some artists and asked them to paint some frescoes on the walls of the Debating Hall of the Oxford Union Society. Among the artists there was Morris who painted the roof of the building. William Morris was not very good in the drawing of figures and therefore he left the place for the figures blank for other artists to fill them. Nevertheless he made some good paintings like La Belle Iseult but he soon recognized that painting was not good for him (Bradley 1978:19). Conversely, this early recognition of himself made him engage in other artistic creations. He experimented with stained glass, manuscript illumination and embroidery (Bradley 1978:18). He actually applied his techniques in his house after his marriage to Jane Burden. He wanted to create a very medieval in spirit (Bradley 1978:26) house and therefore his friend Philip Webb accepted the challenge, made the designs and built it for him. The house is called The Red House because it is made of 3

red brick and includes the works of William Morris, Street, Byrne-Jones and Rossetti. Moreover, Morris asked his occasionally guests to help him with the decorations so everyone helped a little. The decorations included paintings, tapestries, stained glass and furniture. Morris was very good in arts and crafts and with the assistance of his friends created the majority of the furniture for the house. The designing and decorating of The Red House, gave to Morris and his friends the idea of opening an arts and crafts company. On 11 April 1861, the company of the founder members Madox Brown, Byrne-Jones, Faulkner, Marshall, Morris, Rossetti and Webb, opened to the public. They were all influenced by the ideas of Ruskin against industrialization and they created everything by themselves. The Firm as it was known, was responsible for manufacturing very high quality furniture, stained glass, tiles, tapestry, wallpaper, embroidered hangings, metalwork and for designing and painting interiors (Harrison quoted in Griffiths and Hundleby 2003:34). Furthermore, they were decorating the interiors of museums, palaces, churches and colleges like All Saints and Jesus College Chapel in Cambridge (Naylor 2000:40). Unfortunately the passion they had for creating art made them overlook the financial matters of the company that was a serious problem. They made a lot of exhibitions, the company’s fame had spread and their crafts were very popular. It was indeed so popular that Morris, who was the manager, had undertaken more work than the company could afford and sometimes the work couldn’t finish in the predetermine time (see Bradley 1978:29-38). The most appropriate craft for Morris was the designing of wallpapers. Morris loved the wallpapers and he found them very decorative elements in the interior of the houses. On the wallpapers he could express his love for nature that had from his childhood. He was able to draw flowers, leafs and small animals like birds. There wasn’t any need to draw a complex figure on them and that was a relief for Morris. Individual owners bought most of his wallpapers and there wasn’t a need to produce large quantities of the same wallpaper. To create wallpaper with traditional ways was time consuming because each paper had to be painted separately with particular attention to the colors. Morris was supervising all the work himself to be certain for the result he wanted to achieve.

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Meanwhile, Morris hadn’t forgot his love for poetry and stories and in 1868, he wrote his masterpiece The Earthly Paradise, which was a collection of twenty-four stories based on legends. He wrote many stories and poems and he took pleasure from offering them as gifts to his friends like he did with The Book of Verse to his friend Georgiana Byrne-Jones. During the decade 1860-1870 William Morris find in poetry a way to express his inner self. Family problems led him to isolation but for one more time this isolation filled him with creativity that is spread in his poems and writings. In conclusion, William Morris was a complex figure with many abilities in arts and crafts and he contributed a lot in the British Visual Culture of nineteenth century. His works illustrate the beauty of the traditional crafts and the individual design in an industrialised country. He finally teaches the young artists to create something that they love and believe and not to create something cheap, of low quality and mass because working a craft always leads to art.

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REFERENCES Bradley, I. (1978) William Morris and his world. London, Thames and Hudson Ltd. Griffiths, S. and Hundleby, S. (2003) British Visual Culture and Society Yesterday and Today. Cambridge, APU Naylor, G. (2000) William Morris by himself: Designs and Writings. London, Little, Brown and Company

FURTHER READING Briggs, A. (1980) William Morris: Selected Writings and Designs. Suffolk, The Chaucer Press Ltd Faulkner, P. (1980) Against the Age: An Introduction to William Morris. London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd

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