Category Archives: Dante Gabriel Rossetti

St Ives School : Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham.

People : Bloomsbury, Duncan Grant

Duncan James Corrowr Grant (21 January 1885 – 8 May 1978) was a British painter and designer of textiles, pottery and theatre sets and costumes. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group.

His father was Bartle Grant, a “poverty-stricken” major in the army, and much of his early childhood was spent in India and Burma. He was a grandson of Sir John Peter Grant, 12th Laird of Rothiemurchus, KCB, GCMG, sometime Lt-Governor of Bengal.^‪Duncan was also the first cousin twice removed of John Grant, 13th Earl of Dysart (b. 1946).

Early life

Grant was born on 21 January 1885 in Rothiemurchus, Aviemore, Scotland. He attended school in England from 1894, where he was educated at Hillbrow School, a preparatory school in Rugby, and St Paul’s School, London. Grant showed little enthusiasm for studying but enjoyed art classes. He was encouraged by his art teacher and also his aunt Lady Strachey, who organised private drawing lessons for him. Eventually, he was allowed to follow his desire to become an artist, rather than join the army as his father wished, and he attended Westminster School of Art in 1902. He then studied art at the Slade School and in Italy and Paris.

He was a cousin, and for some time a lover, of Lytton Strachey. Through the Stracheys, Duncan was introduced to the Bloomsbury Group, where John Maynard Keynes became another of his lovers.

Career in art

Grant is best known for his painting style, which developed in the wake of French post-impressionist exhibitions mounted in London in 1910. He often worked with, and was influenced by, another member of the group, art critic and artist Roger Fry. As well as painting landscapes and portraits, Fry designed textiles and ceramics.

After Fry founded the Omega Workshops in 1913, Grant became co-director with Vanessa Bell, who was then involved with Fry. Although Grant had always been actively homosexual, a relationship with Vanessa blossomed, which was both creative and personal, and he eventually moved in with her and her two sons by her husband Clive Bell. In 1916, in support of his application for recognition as a conscientious objector, Grant joined his new lover, David Garnett, in setting up as fruit farmers in Suffolk. Both their applications were initially unsuccessful, but eventually the Central Tribunal agreed to recognise them on condition of their finding more appropriate premises. Vanessa Bell found the house named Charleston near Firle in Sussex. Relationships with Clive Bell remained amicable, and Bell stayed with them for long periods fairly often – sometimes accompanied by his own mistress, Mary Hutchinson.

In 1935 Grant was selected along with nearly 30 other prominent British artists of the day to provide works of art for the RMS Queen Mary then being built in Scotland. Grant was commissioned to provide paintings and fabrics for the first class Main Lounge. In early 1936, after his work was installed in the Lounge, directors from the Cunard Line made a walk-through inspection of the ship. When they saw what Grant had created, they immediately rejected his works and ordered it removed.

Grant is quoted in the book The Mary: The Inevitable Ship, by Potter and Frost, as saying:

“I was not only to paint some large murals to go over the fireplaces, but arrange for the carpets, curtains, textiles, all of which were to be chosen or designed by me. After my initial designs had been passed by the committee I worked on the actual designs for four months. I was then told the committee objected to the scale of the figures on the panels. I consented to alter these, and although it entailed considerable changes, I got a written assurance that I should not be asked to make further alterations. I carried on, and from that time my work was seen constantly by the Company’s (Cunard’s) representative.

When it was all ready I sent the panels to the ship to put the finishing touches to them when hanging. A few days later I received a visit from the Company’s man, who told me that the Chairman had, on his own authority, turned down the panels, refusing to give any reason.

From then on, nothing went right. My carpet designs were rejected and my textiles were not required. The whole thing had taken me about a year….. I never got any reason for the rejection of my work. The company simply said they were not suitable, paid my fee, and that was that.”

Personal life

Duncan’s early affairs were exclusively homosexual. These included his cousin, the writer Lytton Strachey, the future politician Arthur Hobhouse and the economist John Maynard Keynes, who at one time considered Grant the love of his life. Through Strachey, Grant became involved in the Bloomsbury Group, where he made many such great friends including Vanessa Bell. He would eventually live with Vanessa Bell, who though she was a married woman fell deeply in love with him, and one night succeeded in seducing him; Vanessa very much wanted a child by Duncan, and became pregnant in the spring of 1918. Although it is generally assumed that Duncan’s sexual relations with Vanessa ended in the months before Angelica was born (Christmas, 1918), they continued to live together for more than 40 years.

Living with Vanessa was no impediment to Duncan’s relationships with men, either before or after Angelica was born. Angelica grew up believing that Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell was her father; she bore his surname and his behaviour toward her never indicated otherwise. Duncan and Vanessa formed an open relationship, although she herself apparently never took advantage of this after settling down with him and having their child. Duncan, in contrast, had many physical affairs and several serious relationships with other men, most notably David Garnett, who would one day marry Angelica. Duncan’s love and respect for Vanessa, however, kept him with her until her death in 1961.

Angelica wrote: “(Grant) was a homosexual with bisexual leanings”.^‪

Later years

In Grant’s later years, his lover the poet Paul Roche (1916–2007), whom he had known since 1946, took care of him and enabled Grant to maintain his accustomed way of life at Charleston for many years. Roche was made co-heir of Grant’s estate. Grant eventually died in Roche’s home in 1978.

Duncan Grant’s remains are buried beside Vanessa Bell’s in the churchyard of St. Peter’s Church, West Firle, East Sussex.

People : Bloomsbury , Lytton Strachey

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Giles Lytton Strachey (1 March 1880 – 21 January 1932) was a British writer and critic.

A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of Eminent Victorians, he is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. His biography Queen Victoria (1921) was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Early Life and Education

Youth

Strachey was born on 1 March 1880 at Stowey House, Clapham Common, London, the fifth son and the eleventh child of Lieutenant General Sir Richard Strachey, an officer in the British colonial armed forces, and his second wife, the former Jane Grant, who became a leading supporter of the women’s suffrage movement. He was named “Giles Lytton” after an early sixteenth-century Gyles Strachey and the first Earl of Lytton, who had been a friend of Richard Strachey’s when he was Viceroy of India in the late 1870s. The Earl of Lytton was also Lytton Strachey’s godfather. The Stracheys had thirteen children in total, ten of whom survived to adulthood, including Lytton’s sister Dorothy Strachey.

When Lytton was four years old the family moved from Stowey House to 69 Lancaster Gate, North of Kensington Gardens. This was their home until Sir Richard Strachey retired twenty years later. Lady Strachey was an enthusiast for languages and literature, making her children perform their own plays and write verse from early ages. She thought that Lytton had the potential to become a great artist so she decided that he would receive the best education possible in order to be “enlightened”. By 1887 he had begun the study of French, and he was to admire French culture throughout his life.

Strachey was educated at a series of schools, beginning at Parkstone, Dorset. This was a small school with a wide range of after-class activities, where Strachey’s acting skills exceeded those of other pupils: he was particularly convincing when portraying female parts. He even told his mother how much he liked dressing as a woman in real life to confuse and entertain others.

Lady Strachey decided in 1893 that her son should start his more serious education and sent him to Abbotsholme School in Rocester, Derbyshire, where pupils were required to do manual work every day. Strachey, who always had a fragile physique, objected to this requirement and after few months he was transferred to Leamington College, where he became a victim of savage bullying. Sir Richard, however, told his son to “grin and bear the petty bullying”. Strachey did eventually adapt to the school and became one of its best pupils. His health also seems to have improved during the three years he spent at Leamington, although various illnesses continued to plague him.

When Strachey turned seventeen, in 1897, Lady Strachey decided that he was ready to leave school and go to university, but because she thought he was too young for Oxford she decided that he should first attend a smaller institution, the University of Liverpool. There Strachey befriended the Professor of Modern Literature, Walter Raleigh, who, besides being his favourite teacher, also became the most influential figure in his life before he went up to Cambridge. In 1899 Strachey took the Christ Church scholarship examination, wanting to get into Balliol College, Oxford, but the examiners determined that Strachey’s academic achievements were not remarkable and were struck by his “shyness and nervousness”.They recommended Lincoln College as a more suitable institution, advice that Lady Strachey took as an insult, deciding then that he would attend Trinity College, Cambridge, instead.

Cambridge

Strachey was admitted as a Pensioner at Trinity College, Cambridge, on 30 September 1899. He became an Exhibitioner in 1900 and a Scholar in 1902. He won the Chancellor’s Medal for English Verse in 1902 and was given a B.A. degree after he had won a second class in the History Tripos in June 1903. He did not, however, take leave of Trinity, but remained until October 1905, to work on a thesis that he hoped would gain him a Fellowship. Strachey was often ill and had to leave Cambridge repeatedly to recover from the palpitations that affected him.

Strachey’s years at Cambridge were happy and productive. Among the freshmen at Trinity there were three with whom Strachey soon became closely associated: Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf and Saxon Sydney-Turner. With another undergraduate, A. J. Robertson, these students formed a group called the Midnight Society, which, in the opinion of Clive Bell, was the source of the Bloomsbury Group. Other close friends at Cambridge were Thoby Stephen and his sisters Vanessa and Virginia Stephen (later Bell and Woolf respectively).

Strachey also belonged to the Conversazione Society, the Cambridge Apostles to which Tennyson, Hallam, Maurice, and Sterling had once belonged. In these years Strachey was highly prolific in writing verse, much of which has been preserved and some of which was published at the time. Strachey also became acquainted with other men who greatly influenced him, including G. Lowes Dickinson, John Maynard Keynes, Walter Lamb (brother of the painter Henry Lamb), George Mallory, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. Moore’s philosophy, with its assumption that the summum bonum lies in achieving a high quality of humanity, in experiencing delectable states of mind and in intensifying experience by contemplating great works of art, was a particularly important influence.

In the summer of 1903 Strachey applied for a position in the Education Department of the Civil Service. Even though the letters of recommendation written for him by those under whom he had studied showed that he was held in high esteem at Cambridge, he failed to get the appointment and decided to try for a fellowship at Trinity College. He spent the years from 1903 to 1905 writing a 400-page thesis on Warren Hastings, which was not well received by scholars of his time.

Career

Beginnings

After Strachey left Cambridge in 1905 his mother assigned him a bed-sitting room at 69 Lancaster Gate. After the family moved to 67 Belsize Gardens in Hampstead, and later to another house in the same street, he was assigned other bed-sitters. But, as he was about to turn 30, family life started irritating him, and he took to travelling into the country more often, supporting himself by writing reviews and critical articles for The Spectator and other periodicals. About 1910–11 he spent some time at Saltsjöbaden, near Stockholm in Sweden. In this period he also lived for a while in a cottage on Dartmoor and about 1911–12 spent a whole winter at East Ilsley on the Berkshire Downs. During this time he decided to grow a beard, which became his most characteristic feature. On 9 May 1911 he wrote to his mother:

“The chief news is that I have grown a beard! Its colour is very much admired, and it is generally considered extremely effective, though some ill-bred persons have been observed to laugh. It is a red-brown of the most approved tint, and makes me look like a French decadent poet—or something equally distinguished.”

In 1911 H. A. L. Fisher, a former President of the British Academy and of the Board of Education, was in search of someone to write a short one-volume survey of French literature. Fisher had read one of Strachey’s reviews (“Two Frenchmen”, Independent Review (1903)) and asked him to write an outline in 50,000 words, giving him J. W. Mackail’s Latin Literature (1909) as a model. Landmarks in French Literature, dedicated to “J[ane] M[aria] S[trachey],” his mother, was published on 12 January 1912. Despite almost a full column of praise in The Times Literary Supplement of 1 February and sales that by April 1914 had reached nearly 12,000 copies in the British Empire and America, the book brought Strachey neither the fame he craved nor the money he badly needed.

Eminent Victorians and later career

Soon after the publication of Landmarks, Strachey’s mother and his friend Harry Norton supported him financially. Each provided him with £100, which, together with his earnings from the Edinburgh Review and other periodicals, made it possible for him to rent a small thatched cottage, The Lacket, outside the village of Lockeridge, near Marlborough, Wiltshire. He lived there until 1916 and it was there that he wrote the first three parts of Eminent Victorians.

Strachey’s theory of biography was now fully developed and mature. He was greatly influenced by Dostoyevsky, whose novels he had been reading and reviewing as they appeared in Constance Garnett’s translations. The influence of Freud was important on Strachey’s later works, most notably on Elizabeth and Essex, but not at this earlier stage.

In 1916 Lytton Strachey was back in London living with his mother at 6 Belsize Park Gardens, Hampstead, where she had now moved. In the late autumn of 1917, however, his brother Oliver and his friends Harry Norton, John Maynard Keynes and Saxon Sydney-Turner agreed to pay the rent on the Mill House at Tidmarsh, near Pangbourne, Berkshire.

From 1904 to 1914 Strachey contributed book and theatre reviews to The Spectator.

During the First World War Strachey applied for recognition as a conscientious objector, but in the event he was granted exemption from military service on health grounds. He spent much of the war with like-minded people such as Lady Ottoline Morrell and the Bloomsberries.

His first great success, and his most famous achievement, was Eminent Victorians (1918), a collection of four short biographies of Victorian heroes. This work was followed by another in the same style, Queen Victoria (1921).

From then on Strachey needed no further financial aid. He continued to live at Tidmarsh until 1924, when he moved to Ham Spray House near Marlborough, Wiltshire. This was his home for the rest of his life.

Death

Strachey died of (undiagnosed) stomach cancer on January 21,1932, at the age of 51. It is reported that his final words, before his death were: “If this is dying, then I don’t think much of it.”

Personal Life and Sexuality

Though Strachey spoke openly about his homosexuality with his Bloomsbury friends, and had a relationship with John Maynard Keynes, who was also a member of the Bloomsbury group, it was not widely publicised until the late 1960s, in a biography by Michael Holroyd.

Strachey had an unusual relationship with the painter Dora Carrington. She loved him and they lived together from 1917 until his death. In 1921 Carrington agreed to marry Ralph Partridge, not for love but to secure the three-way relationship. She committed suicide two months after Strachey’s death. Strachey himself had been much more interested sexually in Partridge, as well as in various other young men, including a secret sadomasochistic relationship with Roger Senhouse (later the head of the publishing house Secker & Warburg). Strachey’s letters, edited by Paul Levy, were published in 2005.

In popular culture

Virginia Woolf’s husband Leonard Woolf said that in her experimental novel The Waves “there is something of Lytton in Neville”. Lytton is also said to have been the inspiration behind the character of St John Hirst in her novel The Voyage Out. Michael Holroyd describes Strachey as the inspiration behind Cedric Furber in Wyndham Lewis’s The Self-Condemned. In Lewis’s novel The Apes of God he is seen in the character of Matthew Plunkett, whom Holroyd describes as “a maliciously distorted and hilarious caricature of Lytton”. In the Terminus Note in E. M. Forster’s Maurice Forster remarks that the Cambridge undergraduate Risley in the novel is based on Strachey.

Strachey was portrayed by Jonathan Pryce in the film Carrington (1995), which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival that year; Pryce won Best Actor for his performance. In the film Al sur de Granada (2003) Strachey was portrayed by James Fleet.

Works

Academic works and biographies

Landmarks in French Literature (1912)
Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr Arnold, General Gordon (1918)
Queen Victoria (1921)
Books and Characters (1922)
Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928)
Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays (1931)

Posthumous publications

Characters and Commentaries, ed. James Strachey (1933)
Spectatorial Essays, ed. James Strachey (1964)
Ermyntrude and Esmeralda, (1969)
Lytton Strachey by Himself: A Self-Portrait, ed. Michael Holroyd (1971) (ISBN 978-0-349-11812-3)
The Really Interesting Question, and Other Papers, ed. Paul Levy (1972)
The Shorter Strachey, ed. Michael Holroyd and Paul Levy (1980)
The Letters of Lytton Strachey, ed. Paul Levy (2005) (ISBN 0-670-89112-6)
Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey: Early Papers, ed. Todd Avery (2011)

People : Frank Bramley , Newlyn School Artist, Known For Paintings Of Interiors …

People : Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Artist & Illustrator, Instrumental In Two Major Movements ……

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882) was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. His work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement.

Rossetti’s art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterised by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence The House of Life. Poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossetti’s work; he frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, spanning from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Astarte Syriaca (1877), while also creating art to illustrate poems such as “Goblin Market” by the celebrated poet Christina Rossetti, his sister.

Rossetti’s personal life was closely linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and muses Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris.

Early life

The son of émigré Italian scholar Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti and his wife Frances Polidori, Rossetti was born in London, and named Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti. His family and friends called him Gabriel, but in publications he put the name Dante first (in honour of Dante Alighieri). He was the brother of poet Christina Rossetti, critic William Michael Rossetti, and author Maria Francesca Rossetti.^[2] During his childhood, Rossetti was home educated and often read the Bible, along with the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron.

The young Rossetti is described as “self-possessed, articulate, passionate and charismatic” but also “ardent, poetic and feckless”. Like all his siblings, he aspired to be a poet and attended King’s College School, in its original location near the Strand. He also wished to be a painter, having shown a great interest in Medieval Italian art. He studied at Henry Sass‘s Drawing Academy from 1841 to 1845 when he enrolled at the Antique School of the Royal Academy, leaving in 1848. After leaving the Royal Academy, Rossetti studied under Ford Madox Brown, with whom he retained a close relationship throughout his life.

Following the exhibition of William Holman Hunt‘s painting The Eve of St. Agnes, Rossetti sought out Hunt’s friendship. The painting illustrated a poem by the little-known John Keats. Rossetti’s own poem, “The Blessed Damozel“, was an imitation of Keats, and he believed Hunt might share his artistic and literary ideals. Together they developed the philosophy of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which they founded along with John Everett Millais.

The group’s intention was to reform English art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach first adopted by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo and the formal training regime introduced by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Their approach was to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art. The eminent critic John Ruskin wrote:

Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape background is painted to the last touch, in the open air, from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite figure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait of some living person.

For the first issue of the brotherhood’s magazine, The Germ, published early in 1850, Rossetti contributed a poem, “The Blessed Damozel”, and a story about a fictional early Italian artist inspired by a vision of a woman who bids him combine the human and the divine in his art.^[9] Rossetti was always more interested in the medieval than in the modern side of the movement, working on translations of Dante and other medieval Italian poets, and adopting the stylistic characteristics of the early Italians.

Career

Beginnings

Rossetti’s first major paintings in oil display the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. His Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850) portray Mary as a teenage girl. William Bell Scott saw Girlhood in progress in Hunt’s studio and remarked on young Rossetti’s technique:

He was painting in oils with water-colour brushes, as thinly as in water-colour, on canvas which he had primed with white till the surface was a smooth as cardboard, and every tint remained transparent. I saw at once that he was not an orthodox boy, but acting purely from the aesthetic motive. The mixture of genius and dilettantism of both men shut me up for the moment, and whetted my curiosity.

Stung by criticism of his second major painting, Ecce Ancilla Domini, exhibited in 1850, and the “increasingly hysterical critical reaction that greeted Pre-Raphaelitism” that year, Rossetti turned to watercolours, which could be sold privately. Although his work subsequently won support from John Ruskin, Rossetti only rarely exhibited thereafter.

Dante and Medievalism

In 1850, Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal, an important model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Over the next decade, she became his muse, his pupil, and his passion. They were married in 1860.

Rossetti’s incomplete picture Found, begun in 1853 and unfinished at his death, was his only major modern-life subject. It depicted a prostitute, lifted from the street by a country drover who recognises his old sweetheart. However, Rossetti increasingly preferred symbolic and mythological images to realistic ones,

For many years, Rossetti worked on English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri‘s La Vita Nuova (published as The Early Italian Poets in 1861). These and Sir Thomas Malory‘s Le Morte d’Arthur inspired his art of the 1850s. He created a method of painting in watercolours, using thick pigments mixed with gum to give rich effects similar to medieval illuminations. He also developed a novel drawing technique in pen-and-ink. His first published illustration was “The Maids of Elfen-Mere” (1855), for a poem by his friend William Allingham, and he contributed two illustrations to Edward Moxon’s 1857 edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson‘s Poems and illustrations for works by his sister Christina Rossetti.

His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Neither Burne-Jones nor Morris knew Rossetti, but were much influenced by his works, and met him by recruiting him as a contributor to their Oxford and Cambridge Magazine which Morris founded in 1856 to promote his ideas about art and poetry.

In February 1857, Rossetti wrote to William Bell Scott:

Two young men, projectors of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, have recently come up to town from Oxford, and are now very intimate friends of mine. Their names are Morris and Jones. They have turned artists instead of taking up any other career to which the university generally leads, and both are men of real genius. Jones’s designs are marvels of finish and imaginative detail, unequalled by anything unless perhaps Albert Dürer‘s finest works.

That summer Morris and Rossetti visited Oxford and finding the Oxford Union debating-hall under construction, pursued a commission to paint the upper walls with scenes from Le Morte d’Arthur and to decorate the roof between the open timbers. Seven artists were recruited, among them Valentine Prinsep and Arthur Hughes, and the work was hastily begun. The frescoes, done too soon and too fast, began to fade at once and now are barely decipherable. Rossetti recruited two sisters, Bessie and Jane Burden, as models for the Oxford Union murals, and Jane became Morris’s wife in 1859.

Religious influence on works

England began to see a revival of religious beliefs and practices starting in 1833 and moving onward to about 1845. The Oxford Movement, also known as the Tractarian Movement, had recently began a push toward the restoration of Christian traditions that had been lost in the Church. Rossetti and his family had been attending Christ Church on Albany Street, since 1843. His brother, William Michael Rossetti recorded that services began changing in the church since the start of the “High Anglican movement”. Rev. William Dodsworth was responsible for these changes, including the addition of the Catholic practice of placing flowers and candles by the altar. Rossetti and his family, along with two of his colleagues (one of which cofounded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) had also attended St. Andrew’s on Wells Street, a High Anglican church. It is noted that the Anglo-Catholic revival very much affected Rossetti in the late 1840s and early 1850s. The spiritual expressions of his painting The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, finished in 1849, are evident of this claim. The painting’s altar is decorated very similarly to that of a Catholic altar, proving his familiarity with the Anglo-Catholic revival. The subject of the painting, the Blessed Virgin, is sewing a red cloth, a significant part of the Oxford Movement that emphasized the embroidering of altar cloths by women. Oxford Reformers identified two major aspects to their movement, that “the end of all religion must be communion with God,” and “that the Church was divinely instituted for the very purpose of bringing about this consummation.”

From the beginning of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood‘s formation in 1848, their pieces of art included subjects of noble or religious disposition. Their aim was to communicate a message of “moral reform” through the style of their works, exhibiting a “truth to nature”. Specifically in Rossetti’s “Hand and Soul,” written in 1849, he displays his main character Chiaro as an artist with spiritual inclinations. In the text, Chiaro’s spirit appears before him in the form of a woman who instructs him to “set thine hand and thy soul to serve man with God.” The Rossetti Archive defines this text as “Rossetti’s way of constellating his commitments to art, religious devotion, and a thoroughly secular historicism.” Likewise, in “The Blessed Damozel,” written between 1847 and 1870, Rossetti uses biblical language such as “From the gold bar of Heaven” to describe the Damozel looking down to Earth from Heaven. Here we see a connection between body and soul, mortal and supernatural, a common theme in Rossetti’s works. In “Ave” (1847), Mary awaits the day that she will meet her son in Heaven, uniting the earthly with the heavenly. The text highlights a strong element in Anglican Marian theology that describes Mary’s body and soul having been assumed into Heaven.

A new direction

Around 1860, Rossetti returned to oil painting, abandoning the dense medieval compositions of the 1850s in favour of powerful close-up images of women in flat pictorial spaces characterised by dense colour. These paintings became a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement. In them, Rossetti’s depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He portrayed his new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism, whilst Jane Burden, the wife of his business partner William Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess. “As in Rossetti’s previous reforms, the new kind of subject appeared in the context of a wholesale reconfiguration of the practice of painting, from the most basic level of materials and techniques up to the most abstract or conceptual level of the meanings and ideas that can be embodied in visual form.” These new works were based not on medievalism, but on the Italian High Renaissance artists of Venice, Titian and Veronese.

In 1861, Rossetti became a founding partner in the decorative arts firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with Morris, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, Philip Webb, Charles Faulkner and Peter Paul Marshall. Rossetti contributed designs for stained glass and other decorative objects.

Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddal died of an overdose of laudanum in 1862, shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and on the death of his beloved Lizzie, buried the bulk of his unpublished poems with her at Highgate Cemetery, though he later had them dug up. He idealised her image as Dante‘s Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as Beata Beatrix.

Cheyne Walk years

After the death of his wife, Rossetti leased Tudor House at 16, Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea, where he lived for 20 years surrounded by extravagant furnishings and a parade of exotic birds and animals. Rossetti was fascinated with wombats, asking friends to meet him at the “Wombat’s Lair” at the London Zoo in Regent’s Park, and spending hours there. In September 1869 he acquired the first of two pet wombats, which he named “Top”. It was brought to the dinner table and allowed to sleep in the large centrepiece during meals. Rossetti’s fascination with exotic animals continued throughout his life, culminating in the purchase of a llama and a toucan, which he dressed in a cowboy hat and was trained to ride the llama round the dining-table for his amusement.

Rossetti maintained Fanny Cornforth (described delicately by William Allington as Rossetti’s “housekeeper”) in her own establishment nearby in Chelsea, and painted many voluptuous images of her between 1863 and 1865.

In 1865 he discovered auburn-haired Alexa Wilding, a dressmaker and would-be actress who was engaged to model for him on a full-time basis and sat for The Blessed Damozel and other paintings. She sat for more of his finished works than any other model, but comparatively little is known about her due to the lack of any romantic connection with Rossetti. He spotted her one evening in the Strand in 1865 and was immediately struck by her beauty. She agreed to sit for him the following day, but failed to arrive. He spotted her again weeks later, jumped from the cab he was in and persuaded her to go straight to his studio. He paid her a weekly fee to sit for him exclusively, afraid that other artists might employ her. They shared a lasting bond; after Rossetti’s death Wilding was said to have travelled regularly to place a wreath on his grave.

Jane Morris, whom Rossetti had used as a model for the Oxford Union murals he painted with William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones in 1857, also sat for him during these years, she “consumed and obsessed him in paint, poetry, and life”. In 1869, Morris and Rossetti rented a country house, Kelmscott Manor at Kelmscott, Oxfordshire, as a summer home, but it became a retreat for Rossetti and Jane Morris to have a long-lasting and complicated liaison. They spent summers there with the Morris’s children, while Morris travelled to Iceland in 1871 and 1873.

During these years, Rossetti was prevailed upon by friends, in particular Charles Augustus Howell, to exhume his poems from his wife’s grave which he did, collating and publishing them in 1870 in the volume Poems by D. G. Rossetti. They created controversy when they were attacked as the epitome of the “fleshly school of poetry”. Their eroticism and sensuality caused offence. One poem, “Nuptial Sleep”, described a couple falling asleep after sex. It was part of Rossetti’s sonnet sequence The House of Life, a complex series of poems tracing the physical and spiritual development of an intimate relationship. Rossetti described the sonnet form as a “moment’s monument”, implying that it sought to contain the feelings of a fleeting moment, and reflect on their meaning. The House of Life was a series of interacting monuments to these moments – an elaborate whole made from a mosaic of intensely described fragments. It was Rossetti’s most substantial literary achievement. The collection included some translations, including his “Ballad Of Dead Ladies”, an 1869 translation of François Villon‘s poem “Ballade des dames du temps jadis. (The word “yesteryear” is credited to Rossetti as a neologism used for the first time in this translation.)

In 1881, Rossetti published a second volume of poems, Ballads and Sonnets, which included the remaining sonnets from The House of Life sequence.

Decline and death

The savage reaction of critics to Rossetti’s first collection of poetry contributed to a mental breakdown in June 1872, and although he joined Jane at Kelmscott that September, he “spent his days in a haze of chloral and whisky”. The next summer he was much improved, and both Alexa Wilding and Jane Morris sat for him at Kelmscott, where he created a soulful series of dream-like portraits. In 1874, Morris reorganised his decorative arts firm, cutting Rossetti out of the business, and the polite fiction that both men were in residence with Jane at Kelmscott could not be maintained. Rossetti abruptly left Kelmscott in July 1874 and never returned. Toward the end of his life, he sank into a morbid state, darkened by his drug addiction to chloral hydrate and increasing mental instability. He spent his last years as a recluse at Cheyne Walk.

On Easter Sunday, 1882, he died at the country house of a friend, where he had gone in a vain attempt to recover his health, which had been destroyed by chloral as his wife’s had been destroyed by laudanum. He died of Brights Disease, a disease of the kidneys from which he had been suffering for some time. He had been housebound for some years on account of paralysis of the legs, though his chloral addiction is believed to have been a means of alleviating pain from a botched hydrocele removal. He had been suffering from alcohol psychosis for some time brought on by the excessive amounts of whisky he used to drown out the bitter baste of the chloral hydrate. He is buried at Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, England. His grave is visited by admirers of his life’s work and achievements as seen by fresh flowers placed there regularly.

Collections and critical assessment

Tate Britain, Birmingham, Manchester and Salford Museum and Art Galleries all contain large collections of Rossetti’s work; the latter was bequeathed a number of works following the death of L. S. Lowry in 1976. Lowry was president of the Newcastle-based ‘Rossetti Society’, which was founded in 1966. Lowry’s private collection of works was chiefly built around Rossetti’s paintings and sketches of Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris, and notable pieces included Pandora, Proserpine and a drawing of Annie Miller.

In an interview with Mervyn Levy, Lowry explained his fascination with the Rossetti women in relation to his own work: “I don’t like his women at all, but they fascinate me, like a snake. That’s why I always buy Rossetti whenever I can. His women are really rather horrible. It’s like a friend of mine who says he hates my work, although it fascinates him.” The friend Lowry referred to was businessman Monty Bloom, to whom he also explained his obsession with Rossetti’s portraits: “They are not real women.[…] They are dreams.[…] He used them for something in his mind caused by the death of his wife. I may be quite wrong there, but significantly they all came after the death of his wife.”

The popularity, frequent reproduction, and general availability of Rossetti’s later paintings of women have led to this association with “a morbid and langourous sensuality”. His small-scale early works and drawings are less well known, but it is in these that his originality, technical inventiveness, and significance in the movement away from Academic tradition can best be seen. As Roger Fry wrote in 1916, “Rossetti more than any other artist since Blake may be hailed as a forerunner of the new ideas” in English Art.

Media

Film

Rossetti was played by Oliver Reed in Ken Russell‘s television film Dante’s Inferno (1967). The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood has been the subject of two BBC period dramas. The first, The Love School, (1975) features Ben Kingsley as Rossetti. The second was Desperate Romantics, in which Rossetti is played by Aidan Turner. It was broadcast on BBC Two on Tuesday, 21 July 2009.

Selected works

Books

• The Early Italian Poets (a translation) (1861) republished as Dante and His Circle (1874)

• Poems (1870) revised and reissued as Poems. A New Edition (1881)

• Ballads and Sonnets (1881)

• The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (posthumous, 2 volumes, 1886)

• Ballads and Narrative Poems (posthumous, 1893)

• Sonnets and Lyrical Poems (posthumous, 1894)

• The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (posthumous, 1911) (1911)

Double works

“Rossetti divided his attention between painting and poetry for the rest of his life” – Poetry Foundation

• Aspecta Medusa (1865 October 1865 – 1868)

• Astarte Syriaca (for a Picture) (1877 January-1877 February 1875 – 1877)

• Beatrice, her Damozels, and Love (1865?)

• Beauty and the Bird (1855; 1858 June 25)

• The Blessed Damozel (1847-1870; 1871-1881)

• Bocca Baciata (1859-1860)

• Body’s Beauty (1864-1869; 1866)

• The Bride’s Prelude [1848 1870 (circa)]

• Cassandra (For a Drawing.) (1869 September; 1860-1861, 1867, 1869)

• Dante’s Dream on the Day of the Death of Beatrice: 9 June 1290 (1875? 1856)

• Dante Alighieri. “Sestina. Of the Lady Pietra degli Scrovigni.” (1848? 1861, 1874)

• Dante at Verona [1848-1850 1852 (circa)]

• The Day-Dream (for a Picture) (1878-1880; 1880 September)

• Death of A Wombat (1869 November 6)

• Eden Bower [1863-1864 (circa) or 1869 (circa)]

• Fazio’s Mistress (1863; 1873)

• Fiammetta (For a Picture) [1878 (circa) 1878]

• “Found” (for a Picture) (1854; 1881 February)

• Francesca Da Rimini. (Dante.) (1855; 1862 September)

• Guido Cavalcanti. “Ballata. He reveals, in a Dialogue, his increasing love for Mandetta.” (1861)

• Hand and Soul (1849)

• Hero’s Lamp (1875)

• Introductory Sonnet (“A Sonnet is a moment’s monument”) (1880)

• Joan of Arc [1879 (unfinished) 1863, 1882]

• La Bella Mano (For a Picture) (1875)

• La Pia. Dante (1868-1880)

• Lisa ed Elviro (1843)

• Love’s Greeting (1850, 1861, 1864)

• Mary’s Girlhood (For a Picture) [1848 (sonnet I), 1849 (sonnet II) 1848-1849]

• Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee (For a Drawing) (1853-1859; 1869)

• Michael Scott’s Wooing (For a Drawing) (1853, 1869-1871, 1875-1876)

• Mnemosyne (1880)

• Old and New Art (group of 3 poems) [1849 (text); 1857 (picture, circa)]

• On William Morris (1871 September)

• Pandora (For a Picture) (1869; 1868-1871)

• Parody on “Uncle Ned” (1852)

• Parted Love! [1869 September-1869 November (circa]

• The Passover in the Holy Family (For a Drawing) (1849-1856; 1869 September)

• Perlascura. Twelve Coins for One Queen (1878)

• The Portrait (1869)

• Proserpine (1872; 1871-1882)

• The Question (for a Design) (1875; 1882)

• “Retro me, Sathana!” (1847, 1848)

• The Return of Tibullus to Delia (1853-1855, 1867)

• A Sea-Spell (for a Picture) (1870, 1877)

• The Seed of David (For a Picture) (1864)

• Silence. For a Design (1870, 1877)

• Sister Helen [1851-1852; 1870 (circa)]

• Sorrentino (1843)

• Soul’s Beauty (1866; 1864-1870)

• St. Agnes of Intercession (1850; 1860)

• Troy Town (1863-1864; 1869-1870)

• Venus Verticordia. (For a Picture.) (1868 January 16; 1863-1869)

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• William and Marie. A Ballad (1841)

Hidden London : The Dulwich Picture Gallery, Home To The Most Frequently Stolen Painting Of All Time….

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Dulwich Picture Gallery is an art gallery in Dulwich, South London. The Gallery in its current form was designed by Regency architect Sir John Soane using an innovative and influential method of illumination, and was opened to the public in 1817. The building is the oldest public art gallery in England but the Gallery only recently became an independent charitable trust, established as such in 1994. Until this time the Gallery was part of Alleyn’s College of God’s Gift, a charitable foundation established by the actor, entrepreneur and philanthropist Edward Alleyn in the early seventeenth century. Due to the acquisition of artworks by its founders and bequests of varying sizes from its many patrons, Dulwich Picture Gallery houses one of the country’s finest collections of Old Masters, especially rich in French, Italian and Spanish Baroque paintings and in British portraits from Tudor times to the 19th century.

History

Early History of the Gallery

Edward Alleyn (1566–1626) began his career as an actor, and later became an entrepreneur within Elizabethan theatre. His commercial interests in the Rose and Fortune Theatres (a major competitor to the Globe Theatre), gave him sufficient wealth to acquire the Manor of Dulwich in 1605. He founded and endowed with his estate his college at Dulwich, combining a school for boys and almshouses for the local poor under the name ‘the College of God’s Gift’ i.e. Jesus Christ. The College has established what became three separate beneficiary schools – Dulwich College, Alleyn’s School, and James Allen’s Girls School, named after the Master of the College during the early eighteenth century. The original College, with its attached almshouses and chapel, survives next to the Gallery today on Gallery Road, although its exterior has undergone extensive renovation.

After his death, the College received the bequest of a collection of works from Alleyn, including a set of portraits of the Kings and Queens of England. Alleyn’s career as an actor meant that the college retained connections with the theatre and in 1686, the actor William Cartwright (1606–1686) bequeathed a collection of 239 pictures, of which 80 are now identifiable at Dulwich.

In the eighteenth century, the collection of pictures were displayed in the first floor of the wing of the Old College. The collection attracted few additions during this period, and recorded descriptions of the Gallery suggest disappointment and apathy from its visitors. The art historian and Whig politician Horace Walpole wrote that he saw “a hundred mouldy portraits among apostles sibyls and kings of England”.

Later History – Bourgeois, Desenfans and Sir John Soane

The Dulwich collection was greatly improved in size and quality of work by Sir Francis Bourgeois (1753–1811), originally from Switzerland, and his business partner, Frenchman Noël Desenfans. Their involvement saw the Gallery make significant steps towards its present state, and because of this they are credited as the founders of Dulwich Picture Gallery. The two ran a successful art dealership in London and in 1790 were commissioned by the King of The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Stanislaus Augustus, to put together a “national collection for Poland”, which the monarch thought would encourage fine arts in Poland. Desenfans had previously lobbied the British Government for the creation of a similar British National Collection, offering to contribute to it, but this idea had been at the time unenthusiastically received. Touring around Europe buying fine art, Bourgeois and Desenfans took five years to put the collection together, but by 1795 The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had been partitioned — divided up by its stronger neighbours – and no longer existed.

Bourgeois and Desenfans attempted to sell the collection to other nations but were unsuccessful. Instead, they sold small pieces to fund the purchase of further important works, initially keeping the collection in Desenfans’ house in Charlotte Street near Portland Place (now Hallam Street). After the death of Desenfans in 1807, Bourgeois inherited the collection. Initially, he commissioned Sir John Soane to design and construct a mausoleum for Desenfans in the midst of the collection at the house, but was unable to secure the freehold from the property’s owners. Bourgeois therefore, bequeathed his collection to the College of God’s Gift at the reported advice of the actor John Philip Kemble, a friend of the two dealers. Stipulated in his will was the construction of a new Gallery in Dulwich, designed by Soane, in which the collection would be displayed. The will also left £2,000 for construction costs, with a further £4,000 contributed by Desenfan’s widow.

The Gallery was opened to students of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1815, two years before the official opening to the public in 1817, due to a problem with the Gallery’s heating system. It quickly became a popular site for copyists from London schools of art. Its collection was frequented by many notable cultural figures over the next hundred years, many of which first visited as students, including John Constable, William Etty, Joseph Mallord William Turner, and later in the century, Vincent van Gogh. Charles Dickens too mentions Dulwich Picture Gallery in his novel The Pickwick Papers, as Samuel Pickwick, the novel’s protagonist, is a visitor to the Gallery in his retirement.

Modern history

In the early hours of 31 December 1966 eight paintings were stolen: three by Rembrandt, A Girl at the Window, a version of Portrait of Titus and a portrait of fellow artist, Jacob de Gheyn lll (see below); three by Rubens, Three Women with a Cornucopia, St. Barbara and The Three Graces; and one, A Lady Playing on the Clavicord by Gerrit Dou and, Susannah and the Elders by Adam Elsheimer. They were worth at the time at least £3 million in total but a reward of just £1,000 was offered for their return. Nevertheless within a few days all the paintings were recovered as the result of an investigation led by Detective Superintendent Charles Hewett, who had previously investigated suspected serial killer Dr John Bodkin Adams.

Michael Hall, an unemployed ambulance driver, was the only one of the thieves caught and was sentenced to five years in prison.

Rembrandt’s small early Portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III has been stolen and recovered four times, most recently in 1983, and is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the most frequently stolen artwork in the world. It has variously been recovered from a left-luggage office in West Germany in 1986; returned anonymously; found on the back of a bicycle; and discovered under a bench in a graveyard in nearby Streatham. The painting is now closely guarded by an upgraded security system.

In 1995 a major reorganisation of the historic Alleyn’s College charity resulted in the reconstitution of Dulwich Picture Gallery as an independent registered charity.

In 2011 the Gallery celebrated its Bicentenary year.

Donors

The Gallery attracted donors from an early age. A major addition to the collection came in 1835, when William Linley [1771–1835] — last of a musical and theatrical family, (many of whom had connections to Dulwich College) and brother-in-law to playwright Richard Sheridan — bequeathed his collection of family portraits to the gallery on his death. Among these paintings were works by Thomas Gainsborough, Archer James Oliver, James Lonsdale and Sir Thomas Lawrence.

The portraitist and Royal Academician William Beechey [1753–1839] donated the picture of the Gallery founder Bourgeois he had painted on the back of a picture by Joshua Reynolds in 1836. This added two images to the collection, though only one can be shown at a time. As of 2012, the side of the canvas on display is the one executed by Reynolds.

British portrait art became better represented due to the benefaction of Charles Fairfax Murray, a Pre-Raphaelite painter, collector and dealer. A group of forty pictures to the gallery were donated by Murray in 1911, with others following in 1915 and 1917–18.

Gallery Design

Dulwich Picture Gallery’s clear design and basic architecture of a series of interlinked rooms lit by natural light through overhead skylights has been the primary influence on art gallery design ever since. Soane designed the sky lights to illuminate the paintings indirectly, and gave us one of the great small galleries in which to look at oil paintings.

John Soane’s design is particularly significant in art gallery construction due to its lack of relation to traditional architectural practices or schools of architecture. Instead of constructing a facade with the stucco porticos favoured by many contemporary architects, Soane opted to use uninterrupted raw brick in his design, a feature that has subsequently been adopted by many modern art galleries in the 20th century. The architect Philip Johnson [1906–2005] said of the space “Soane has taught us how to display paintings”.

Before Soane settled on the final design, he proposed a number of other ideas for the new building, revolving around a quadrangle belonging to the Alleyn’s charitable foundation, to the south of the existing College buildings. These schemes proved too ambitious and in the end only the gallery was built, conceived originally as one of the wings of the quadrangle. The mausoleum too was Soane’s idea, as Bourgeois had merely indicated a desire to be buried in the College Chapel. Soane however recalled Bourgeois’ desire to construct a mausoleum in Desenfan’s home and his resultant design was axiomatic to that of the Charlotte Street house. Bourgeois and Desenfans, along with Desenfans’ wife, who died in 1815, are buried in the Gallery’s mausoleum. Alms houses constructed by Soane along the west side of the gallery were converted into exhibition space by Charles Barry, Jr. in 1880 and an eastward extension was built to designs by E S Hall between 1908 and 1938.

On 12 July 1944, during World War II, the mausoleum and west wing galleries were badly damaged by a German V1 flying bomb; apparently, the bones were scattered across the lawn in front of the gallery. The three sarcophagi in the mausoleum now once again contain approximately a skeleton each. The buildings were refurbished by Austin Vernon and Partners, and re-opened by The Queen Mother on 27 April 1953.

A modern extension designed by Rick Mather was built in 1999, adding a café, educational facilities, a lecture theatre, a new entrance and glazed walkway, and joining the building to the chapel and offices of Alleyn’s College. Parts of Soane’s original design were also restored, having been changed during previous extensions. This latest refurbishment was opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 25 May 2000.

Morris , Marshall, Faulkner & Co : Later Morris & Co., Design That Is Timeless…….

Bloomsbury : Virginia Woolf , Bipolar Feminist Genius With A Room Of Ones Own….

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Adeline Virginia Woolf née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), with its famous dictum, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Woolf suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, thought to have been the result of what is now termed bipolar disorder, and committed suicide by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59.

Early life

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen at 22 Hyde Park Gate in London. Her parents were Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) and Julia Prinsep Duckworth Stephen (née Jackson) (1846–1895). Leslie Stephen was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer. He was a founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, a work which would influence Woolf’s later experimental biographies. Julia Stephen was a renowned beauty, born in British India to Dr. John and Maria Pattle Jackson. She was also the niece of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and first cousin of the temperance leader Lady Henry Somerset. Julia moved to England with her mother, where she served as a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones.

Woolf was educated by her parents in their literate and well-connected household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Her parents had each been married previously and been widowed, and, consequently, the household contained the children of three marriages. Julia had three children by her first husband, Herbert Duckworth: George, Stella, and Gerald Duckworth. Leslie first married Harriet Marian (Minny) Thackeray (1840–1875), the daughter of William Thackeray, and they had one daughter: Laura Makepeace Stephen, who was declared mentally disabled and lived with the family until she was institutionalised in 1891. Leslie and Julia had four children together: Vanessa Stephen (1879), Thoby Stephen (1880), Virginia (1882), and Adrian Stephen (1883).

Sir Leslie Stephen’s eminence as an editor, critic, and biographer, and his connection to William Thackeray, meant that his children were raised in an environment filled with the influences of Victorian literary society. Henry James, George Henry Lewes, and Virginia’s honorary godfather, James Russell Lowell, were among the visitors to the house. Julia Stephen was equally well connected. She came from a family of beauties who left their mark on Victorian society as models for Pre-Raphaelite artists and early photographers, including her aunt Julia Margaret Cameron who was also a visitor to the Stephen household. Supplementing these influences was the immense library at the Stephens’ house, from which Virginia and Vanessa were taught the classics and English literature. Unlike the girls, their brothers Adrian and Julian (Thoby) were formally educated and sent to Cambridge, a difference that Virginia would resent. The sisters did, however, benefit indirectly from their brothers’ Cambridge contacts, as the boys brought their new intellectual friends home to the Stephens’ drawing room.

According to Woolf’s memoirs, her most vivid childhood memories were not of London but of St. Ives in Cornwall, where the family spent every summer until 1895. The Stephens’ summer home, Talland House, looked out over Porthminster Bay, and is still standing today, though somewhat altered. Memories of these family holidays and impressions of the landscape, especially the Godrevy Lighthouse, informed the fiction Woolf wrote in later years, most notably To the Lighthouse.

The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia’s several nervous breakdowns. She was, however, able to take courses of study (some at degree level) in Greek, Latin, German and history at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London between 1897 and 1901, and this brought her into contact with some of the early reformers of women’s higher education such as Clara Pater, George Warr and Lilian Faithfull (Principal of the King’s Ladies’ Department and noted as one of the Steamboat ladies).Her sister Vanessa also studied Latin, Italian, art and architecture at King’s Ladies’ Department. On 2 May 2013, it was announced that Woolf was to be honoured by her alma mater when, in Autumn 2013, the Virginia Woolf Building of King’s College London would open on Kingsway, London.

The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised. Modern scholars (including her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell) have suggested her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods were also influenced by the sexual abuse to which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate).

Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by periodic mood swings and associated illnesses. She spent three short periods in 1910, 1912 and 1913 at Burley House, 15 Cambridge Park, Twickenham, described as “a private nursing home for women with nervous disorder”.Though this instability often affected her social life, her literary productivity continued with few breaks throughout her life.

Bloomsbury

After the death of their father and Virginia’s second nervous breakdown, Vanessa and Adrian sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and bought a house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury.

Woolf came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Rupert Brooke, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, David Garnett, and Roger Fry, who together formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. Several members of the group attained notoriety in 1910 with the Dreadnought hoax, which Virginia participated in disguised as a male Abyssinian royal. Her complete 1940 talk on the Hoax was discovered and is published in the memoirs collected in the expanded edition of The Platform of Time (2008). In 1907 Vanessa married Clive Bell, and the couple’s interest in avant garde art would have an important influence on Woolf’s development as an author.

Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf on 10 August 1912. Despite his low material status (Woolf referring to Leonard during their engagement as a “penniless Jew”) the couple shared a close bond. Indeed, in 1937, Woolf wrote in her diary: “Love-making—after 25 years can’t bear to be separate … you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete.” The two also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published Virginia’s novels along with works by T.S. Eliot, Laurens van der Post, and others. The Press also commissioned works by contemporary artists, including Dora Carrington and Vanessa Bell.

The ethos of the Bloomsbury group encouraged a liberal approach to sexuality, and in 1922 she met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson. After a tentative start, they began a sexual relationship, which, according to Sackville-West in a letter to her husband dated August 17, 1926, was only twice consummated. However Virginia’s intimacy with Vita seems to have continued into the early 1930s. In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero’s life spans three centuries and both sexes. Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West’s son, wrote “The effect of Vita on Virginia is all contained in Orlando, the longest and most charming love letter in literature, in which she explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her”. After their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf’s death in 1941. Virginia Woolf also remained close to her surviving siblings, Adrian and Vanessa; Thoby had died of typhoid fever at the age of 26.

Work

Woolf began writing professionally in 1900, initially for the Times Literary Supplement with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 by her half-brother’s imprint, Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd. This novel was originally titled Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly changed the draft. An earlier version of The Voyage Out has been reconstructed by Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo and is now available to the public under the intended title. DeSalvo argues that many of the changes Woolf made in the text were in response to changes in her own life.

Woolf went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular success. Much of her work was self-published through the Hogarth Press. She is seen as a major twentieth century novelist and one of the foremost modernists.

Woolf is considered a major innovator in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters. Woolf’s reputation declined sharply after World War II, but her importance was re-established with the growth of feminist criticism in the 1970s.

Virginia Woolf’s peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters’ receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions. Woolf has often been credited with stream of consciousness writing alongside her modernist contemporaries like James Joyce and Joseph Conrad.

The intensity of Virginia Woolf’s poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings—often wartime environments—of most of her novels. For example, Mrs Dalloway (1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to organise a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep psychological scars.

To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centres on the Ramsay family’s anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation’s inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind. It also explores the passage of time, and how women are forced by society to allow men to take emotional strength from them.

Orlando (1928) is one of Virginia Woolf’s lightest novels. A parodic biography of a young nobleman who lives for three centuries without ageing much past thirty (but who does abruptly turn into a woman), the book is in part a portrait of Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West. It was meant to console Vita for the loss of her ancestral home, though it is also a satirical treatment of Vita and her work. In Orlando, the techniques of historical biographers are being ridiculed; the character of a pompous biographer is being assumed in order for it to be mocked.

The Waves (1931) presents a group of six friends whose reflections, which are closer to recitatives than to interior monologues proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a prose poem than to a plot-centred novel.

Flush: A Biography (1933) is a part-fiction, part-biography of the cocker spaniel owned by Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The book is written from the dog’s point of view. Woolf was inspired to write this book from the success of the Rudolf Besier play, The Barretts of Wimpole Street. In the play, Flush is on stage for much of the action. The play was produced for the first time in 1932 by actress Katharine Cornell.

Her last work, Between the Acts (1941), sums up and magnifies Woolf’s chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation—all set in a highly imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost all of English history. This book is the most lyrical of all her works, not only in feeling but in style, being chiefly written in verse. While Woolf’s work can be understood as consistently in dialogue with Bloomsbury, particularly its tendency (informed by G. E. Moore, among others) towards doctrinaire rationalism, it is not a simple recapitulation of the coterie’s ideals.

Woolf’s works have been translated into over 50 languages, by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Marguerite Yourcenar.

Attitudes toward Judaism, Christianity and fascism

Woolf was criticised by some as an antisemite, despite her being happily married to a Jewish man. This antisemitism is drawn from the fact that she often wrote of Jewish characters in stereotypical archetypes and generalisations, including describing some of her Jewish characters as physically repulsive and dirty. The overwhelming^[ and rising 1920s and 1930s antisemitism possibly influenced Virginia Woolf. She wrote in her diary: “I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh.” However, in a 1930 letter to the composer Ethel Smyth, quoted in Nigel Nicolson’s biography Virginia Woolf, she recollects her boasts of Leonard’s Jewishness confirming her snobbish tendencies, “How I hated marrying a Jew- What a snob I was, for they have immense vitality.”

In another letter to Smyth, Woolf gives a scathing denunciation of Christianity, seeing it as self-righteous “egotism” and stating “my Jew has more religion in one toe nail—more human love, in one hair.”

Woolf and her husband Leonard hated and feared 1930s fascism with its antisemitism even before knowing they were on Hitler’s blacklist. Her 1938 book Three Guineas was an indictment of fascism.

Death

After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work. On 28 March 1941, Woolf put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, walked into the River Ouse near her home, and drowned herself. Woolf’s body was not found until 18 April 1941. Her husband buried her cremated remains under an elm in the garden of Monk’s House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.

In her last note to her husband she wrote:

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.

Modern scholarship and interpretations

Though at least one biography of Virginia Woolf appeared in her lifetime, the first authoritative study of her life was published in 1972 by her nephew Quentin Bell.

Hermione Lee’s 1996 biography Virginia Woolf provides a thorough and authoritative examination of Woolf’s life and work.

In 2001 Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska edited The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Julia Briggs’s Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, published in 2005, is the most recent examination of Woolf’s life. It focuses on Woolf’s writing, including her novels and her commentary on the creative process, to illuminate her life. Thomas Szasz’s book My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf ) was published in 2006.

Feminism

Recently, studies of Virginia Woolf have focused on feminist and lesbian themes in her work, such as in the 1997 collection of critical essays, Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer.

Woolf’s best-known nonfiction works, A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), examine the difficulties that female writers and intellectuals face because men hold disproportionate legal and economic power and the future of women in education and society. In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir counts, of all women who ever lived, only three female writers—Emily Brontë, Woolf and “sometimes” Katherine Mansfield—who have explored “the given.”

Mental illness

Much scholarship has been made of Woolf’s mental illness, described as a “manic-depressive illness” in Thomas Caramagno’s 1992 book, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness, in which he also warns against the “neurotic-genius” way of looking at mental illness, where people rationalise that creativity is somehow born of mental illness. In two books by Stephen Trombley, Woolf is described as having a confrontational relationship with her doctors, and possibly being a woman who is a “victim of male medicine”, referring to the contemporary relative lack of understanding about mental illness.

Irene Coates’s book Who’s Afraid of Leonard Woolf: A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf holds that Leonard Woolf’s treatment of his wife encouraged her ill health and ultimately was responsible for her death. Though extensively researched, this view is not accepted by Leonard’s family. Victoria Glendinning’s book Leonard Woolf: A Biography argues that Leonard Woolf was not only supportive of his wife but enabled her to live as long as she did by providing her with the life and atmosphere she needed to live and write. Virginia’s own diaries support this view of the Woolfs’ marriage.

Controversially, Louise A. DeSalvo reads most of Woolf’s life and career through the lens of the incestuous sexual abuse Woolf suffered as a young woman in her 1989 book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work.

Woolf’s fiction is also studied for its insight into shell shock, war, class and modern British society.

People : William Morris, Mr Arts and Crafts needs no Introduction.

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William Morris (1834-1896) is regarded as the greatest designer and one of the most outstanding figures of the Arts and Crafts Movement. He was also a poet, artist, philosopher, typographer and political theorist. In 1861, with a group of friends, he started the decorating business Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. which provided beautiful, hand-crafted products and furnishings for the home. This was highly controversial at the time as it denounced the ‘progress’ of the machine age by rejecting unnecessary mechanical intervention. Influenced by the ideas and writings of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, who sought to re-dress class inequality and improve society by reinstating the values of the past, Morris was motivated by the desire to provide affordable ‘art for all.’

Driven by his boundless enthusiasm, the output of the company was prolific and encompassed all the decorative arts. He is perhaps best known for his wallpaper and fabric designs but he also designed and made embroideries, tapestries and stained-glass, reviving many of the traditional arts which had been swept away by industrialisation. Before he mastered each craft, he learnt every stage of the hand making process and understood his materials thoroughly so that he could get the best results and teach others.

Over the next 150 years, Morris & Co. enjoyed long periods of exponential growth but also suffered significant downturns from poor direction and the turbulent years of the First and Second World Wars. Some of the stories behind the history are told here but this is by no means an exhaustive account. We bring you an overview of the origins, achievements and landmark events that have taken place.

At the bottom of this page we have provided Further Reading to direct you to just some of the publications and resources on this expansive and fascinating subject, and the life and times of William Morris. Following this, in Places to Visit, we have identified beautiful and inspiring houses decorated in original Morris & Co. furnishings and decorative art where you can learn about the people who followed his principles on interior design and shared his passion, or were in his immediate circle and influenced his work and ideas.

WILLIAM MORRIS

‘I DO NOT WANT ART FOR A FEW, ANY MORE THAN EDUCATION FOR A FEW, OR FREEDOM FOR A FEW.’

William Morris was born in Walthamstow in 1834, into a wealthy middle-class family, and brought up in a large household unusually imbued with the spirit of the Middle Ages which influenced the clothes they wore, their pastimes, their home furnishings and even the food they ate. The eldest son of nine children, Morris’s father was a successful broker in the City of London and the family leased many houses during his childhood. When he was fourteen and still at boarding school, the family moved into Water House (now the William Morris Gallery) where Morris spent his school holidays exploring the idyllic rural surroundings.

Morris developed an early appreciation of the beauty of nature honestly expressed through literature and art. He was equipped with a strong moral and social compass which inspired his utopian views of how a fairer society must be achieved in an age of class division. When he was seventeen, London was showcasing the very best of British manufacturing, art and industry at the 1851 Great Exhibition. Morris refused to enter, repelled by the ‘ugliness’ of what he expected to find there.

When Morris was at Oxford University studying theology he met Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98), and they became interested in the notion of living in an artistic community brought together by a shared purpose. He wanted to return to the medieval system that supported craft through the notion of artisan guilds (which revered and valued the artist) at a time when the status of the individual maker had been diminished by the mechanisation of the industrial revolution.

Disillusioned by his chosen career, Morris dropped out of University and pursued a profession in architecture where he met the designer and architect, Philip Webb (1831-1915). Shortly after, he switched to painting, became part of a group of artists self-named the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and achieved some success. Morris married Jane Burden in 1859. He had already begun publishing his own poetry, and at this time was better known as a poet than an artist.

Whilst on a trip to France to study gothic cathedrals and castles, Morris and Webb discussed the idea of designing and building a house – a home for Morris and an artistic community which he and Burne-Jones had dreamt of since their university days. Work started as soon as they returned to England, and in 1859 Webb designed a red brick house in the medieval style for Morris and Jane. After they moved in Morris and his friends set about decorating ‘Red House’, as it became known, with a shared vision and in the spirit of creativity and freedom of expression.

WILLIAM AND JANE MORRIS MOVED IN TO RED HOUSE IN THE SUMMER OF 1860 AND WERE FREQUENTLY VISITED BY FRIENDS, ESPECIALLY BURNE-JONES AND HIS NEW WIFE (THE ARTIST GEORGIANA MACDONALD), ROSSETTI AND HIS WIFE AND MUSE LIZZIE SIDDAL, AND CHARLES FAULKNER.

Collectively they all helped decorate and furnish the house – nothing was factory made. Huge murals were painted on the walls and in the dining room; William and Jane were depicted as king and queen at a medieval wedding banquet. Most of the ceilings were painted in small geometric patterns, the designs pricked out in the plasterwork, which still look modern today.

Morris brought in antiques, Persian carpets, ironwork and the large wardrobe depicting Chaucer’s ‘Prioress Tale’ from ‘A Canterbury Tale’, a wedding present, hand-made and decorated by Burne-Jones and Webb. However, Morris struggled to find new furniture and decorative objects in the simple gothic style, so Webb made candlesticks, fire-irons, grates and new furniture often lavishly painted in scenes from literature. Burne-Jones and Webb created numerous stained glass windows, some depicting naïve medieval animals and plants.

Instead of wallpapering, they embroidered fabric hangings to line some of the walls. Morris, self-taught in medieval embroidery techniques, instructed Jane and her sister Bessie to help carry out the work. He designed a simple ‘Daisy’ motif, inspired by a 15th century Dutch illuminated manuscript, which they embroidered onto indigo wool serge. She wrote ‘we worked in bright colours in a simple, rough way – the work went quickly and when we finished we covered the walls of the bedroom at Red House to our great joy’.

Then, Jane and Bessie embarked on a much more ambitious project – to embroider 12 large hangings, designed by Morris, depicting ‘Illustrious Women’ from the works of Chaucer. Reminiscent of stained glass design, the heavy-outlined figures were intended to be cut from the cloth and appliquéd onto wool serge to hang in the drawing room.

THE GARDEN

The medieval inspired walled garden was formally arranged using wattle trellis and retained some of the original orchard. Webb and Morris carefully researched and selected plants for the garden: native Ayrshire rose and Aaron’s rod and exotic passion flower. The informal planting scheme of lilies, sunflowers, lavender, honeysuckle, jasmine and rosemary all mingled against the climbers which Webb advised would disguise the look of new brick.

Leading from the back door, there is a small covered porch with bench called the ‘Pilgrim’s Rest’, decorated with tiles designed by Burne-Jones and Morris. Georgiana wrote that this was where they ‘sat and talked and looked out into the well court, of which two sides were formed by the house and the other two by a tall rose-trellis’ and which ‘summed up the feeling of the whole place’.

Jane gave birth to a daughter, Jenny, in 1861 and a second daughter, May, in 1862. Georgiana Burne-Jones’s first son Philip was also born in 1861.

Inspired by their success, they turned their experience into a decorating business in 1861 under the name Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company. The founding members were: William Morris, the painters Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown (1821-93) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), an engineer and amateur artist Peter Paul Marshall (1830-1900), the architect Philip Webb, and the company’s book keeper Charles James Faulkner (1833-92).

How the partners’ lives became inextricably linked is itself a fascinating story centred round one particular radical art scene that crossed social and cultural boundaries. These introductions were soon to meld into an extraordinary group of people who went on to revolutionise art and interior design in the Victorian era

THE FOUNDERS OF MORRIS, MARSHALL, FAULKNER & CO.

Morris’s first career choice was to go into the Church and in 1853 he enrolled to study theology at Oxford University where he became life-long friends with fellow under-graduate Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898). Burne-Jones had attended Birmingham School of Art, but intended to become a church minister. They were intrigued by the idea of reviving the medieval tradition of living and working in a monastic community, a metier which Morris had held since he was a boy. The two men also had an interest and talent in the arts, both influenced by the Arthurian subjects and romanticism of the painter and poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882).

Rossetti trained at the Antique School at the Royal Academy of Arts and found inspiration in the naturalism and purity of the art produced before the classicism of Raphael. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) in 1848, along with William Holman-Hunt and John Everett Millais, and set about reforming and challenging the conventional art establishment through paintings rich in symbolism, nature and colour. Rossetti studied under the painter Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893), whom he greatly admired. Brown was known for his paintings with a strong narrative and moral message and although he never became a member of the PRB, he was closely associated with its members.

Brown exhibited at the Liverpool Academy in the early 1850s and it may have been here that he met amateur artist Peter Paul Marshall (1830-1900), a civil engineer from Scotland. Brown introduced Marshall to the members of the PRB in London and he later married the daughter of one of their patrons.

After a tour of France visiting Gothic cathedrals and an exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art in Paris in 1855, Burne-Jones and Morris reconsidered their careers: Burne-Jones dropped out of University to become a painter and set up a studio in Red Lion Square, London. He and Morris founded the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine which gave a platform to their views on the arts. Rossetti contributed articles to the paper at their request and it was then that the three were finally to meet. Rossetti became a mentor to Burne-Jones and actively supported him in his artistic endeavours. Morris was now being drawn to architecture and he secured himself an apprenticeship with Gothic Revivalist George Edmund Street in Oxford in 1856 where he trained under Philip Webb (1831-1915).

Philip Webb grew up in Oxford and developed an appreciation of the domestic and ecclesiastical buildings of that historic city and surrounding villages. He was a talented artist and decided early in life to become an architect. One of his first short-lived employments was in Wolverhampton but the harsh reality of an industrial manufacturing town and ugly modern urban sprawl drove him back to Oxford where he worked with G.E. Street in 1854.

Webb and Morris were relocated to London when Street’s practice moved to the city. Morris shared lodgings with Burne-Jones in Red Lion Square, but became increasingly frustrated with architecture and longed to create with his hands, not just design on paper. In 1856, encouraged by Rossetti, Morris found the courage to abandon architecture and become a painter. Financially independent, Morris was privileged to enjoy the life of an artist without having to earn a living; his paintings received mixed reviews.

Their first commission, in 1857, was to paint murals on the upper walls and ceiling in the new Oxford Union debating chamber in 1857. They were helped by Webb and Charles Faulkner (1833-1892), a friend from their student days who was now a Mathematics tutor at the university. Whilst at the theatre one evening Rossetti ‘discovered’ local sisters Jane and Bessie Burden and they became models for the murals – their haunting beauty capturing the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelite style.

MORRIS, MARSHALL, FAULKNER & CO.

‘WHATEVER YOU HAVE IN YOUR ROOMS THINK FIRST OF THE WALLS; FOR THEY ARE THAT WHICH MAKES YOUR HOUSE AND HOME.’

Putting up much of the capital himself, William Morris set up a studio and showroom at 8 Red Lion Square. In those early years, ‘The Firm’ as it became known, concentrated on stained glass and other ecclesiastical arts for church decoration such as metalwork, furniture, embroidery and murals. Morris denounced the popular, heavy-handed renovations of old churches, but found plenty of work in refurbishing them or decorating the new churches rapidly being built. Initially outsourcing to other companies, production was brought in-house only when partners had mastered the necessary skills and they had acquired workshops large enough.

The Firm began to appear at international exhibitions and receive awards such as for stained glass and furniture at the 1862 International Exhibition. In 1867 The Firm was asked to decorate the Dining Room at the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum), and the Armoury and Tapestry Rooms at St. James’ Palace. These two significant commissions brought prestige and recognition, and secured the future of the business.

BLOCK-PRINTED WALLPAPER

In 1862 Morris focused on designing wallpapers, starting with ‘Daisy’, ‘Fruit’ and ‘Trellis’ which were printed using wood-blocks in 1864. The pear-wood blocks were hand cut and prepared by the specialist firm, Barretts of East London. The design was chiselled into the block and for fine lines and detailing, metal strips or pins were pressed into the wood. Morris appointed wallpaper manufacturer Jeffrey & Co. to print the papers, which they did until 1926. Under the watchful of eye of Managing Director Metford Warner, an area within the factory was reserved just for the production of Morris & Co. wallpapers’ and Warner and Morris worked closely together until each paper was exactly as Morris wanted it. Finding inspiration in the gardens and wild hedgerows of England, Morris captured the randomness and beauty of nature in patter.

The Jeffrey log books, dating from the late 1860s to 1919, contain 309 entries which are numbered sequentially by production. These reference books provide accurate colour samples taken from every paper as it came off the production line, with notes from the printer relating to colour requirements or tone. Morris was always sought for approval on the colour and design prior to production, and he would receive samples during the proofing ‘strike-off’ stage which he returned to Warner, with further instructions if necessary.

William Morris favoured mineral based natural dyes over the synthetic modern equivalents popular in the 1860s, because they were true to the medieval tradition and ‘aged’ beautifully. However, some of the pigments used, such as arsenic (found in the colour green), were discovered to have lethal side-effects. Early Morris wallpapers have been found to contain these toxins but later colours were modified and attempts were made to allay customers’ concerns about safety through advertising.

One of Morris & Co.’s most important commissions was to redecorate the entrance and banqueting rooms of St. James’ Palace. The resulting paper, known as ‘The St. James’, was installed in 1880 and printed with highlights in gold and silver. It required 68 printing blocks to create the repeating pattern over two wallpaper widths and a vertical pattern repeat of 127cm.

In the 1880s Japan was exporting heavily gilded and richly coloured ‘leather papers’ to the British market. At Morris & Co., these exclusive papers were applied to specially designed four-fold screens, created by Dearle. By 1885 Jeffrey & Co. had perfected a process to replicate Japanese leather papers and became the first British company to manufacture, sell and distribute these much sought after affordable alternatives. The process involved block printing on ‘foiled’ paper, lacquering, stamping and stencilling in oil colour.

In 1887 Queen Victoria commissioned Morris & Co. to design wallpaper for Balmoral Castle with the VRI cipher incorporated into the design.

During his career, Morris designed 46 wallpapers and four ceiling papers, amassing to half the total patterns released by the company. Designs for wallpaper were sometimes revisited or used for future projects. ‘Trellis’ wallpaper, inspired by the garden at Red House, was used in May and Jenny Morris’s nursery at their next home in Queens Square, and ten years later in Morris’s bedroom in Kelmscott House, Hammersmith. The design was also adapted into bed hangings for Morris’s bedroom at Kelmscott Manor, embroidered onto a linen cloth by May Morris and friends between 1891-4.

CERAMICS

‘I SHOULD SAY THAT THE MAKING OF UGLY POTTERY WAS ONE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE INVENTIONS OF OUR CIVILISATION’.

In the 1860s Morris began importing ‘blank’ white tiles from Holland. The designs, created by William de Morgan, Morris, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Brown and Webb, were then hand painted by Kate and Lucy Faulkner and Georgiana Burne-Jones. The first popular design was ‘Daisy’, produced in 1862, and derived from the embroidered hangings from Red House. As with all his endeavours, Morris became interested in the techniques necessary to create the products and learnt about glazes and enamels, inspired by early Delft tiles. A kiln was installed in the basement of 8 Red Lion Square.

Although never a partner of ‘The Firm’, William de Morgan supplied ceramics. Through constant experimentation, de Morgan re-discovered the techniques of lustreware using metal oxides in the firing process. By the 1870s all ceramic tile production was outsourced to de Morgan’s own pottery. His beautiful vases, bowls and plates were later sold through the Morris & Co. Oxford Street showroom and his tiles were typically sold for use on furniture such as washstands and fireplaces, or as large patterned panels made up of a series of tiles, such as the Artichoke Tile panel designed in 1876.

At the other end of the scale, the housing boom of the 1880s and ‘90s created a huge demand for tiles which provided a cheap and hygienic wall-covering for large housing estates and public buildings. However, competition was steep as machine manufacturing was already well-established in Britain.

William and Jane’s eldest daughter Jenny posed for many of The Firm’s early art works, in particular a panel of tiles called ‘The Angels of Creation’ designed by Burne-Jones for a church in Staffordshire. Tragically, after a promising childhood likely to have led to her attending Oxford or Cambridge University, Jenny developed epilepsy in 1876, and her adult life was spent in almost constant ill-health, debilitated by her condition.

FURNITURE

Before Red House, Morris’s interest in furniture began as a student when he furnished his lodgings by making a large but elementary medieval inspired table, settle and set of chairs.

Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. set up a furniture workshop in Great Ormond Yard in London and in the 1860s The Firm launched the ‘Sussex Chair’. With a rush seat and ebonised frame, this simple piece of furniture became one of the most iconic items within the entire range. Bought in huge numbers, the Sussex Chair was also favoured by the partners for use in their homes.

Morris categorised furniture into two groups: ‘work-a-day’ and ‘state furniture’. Unlike the popular Victorian style of fussy and often superfluous pieces, Morris’s furniture was always purposeful, simple and handmade with construction methods intentionally on show. ‘State’ furniture referred to the grander, solid oak sideboards and cabinets, often stained black or green, decorated with panels in stamped leather, lacquered or painted in gesso or oil.

The early work-a-day furniture was often designed by Ford Madox Brown, whilst Rossetti was responsible for more English country furniture and Webb concentrated on state furniture with pared-down Gothic ornament. Originally made by a local cabinet maker in Great Ormond Yard, The Firm also employed apprentices from the Euston Road Boys Home. Hand painting was carried out by Brown, Rossetti and Morris. Furniture first created to furnish Red House was often revisited by Webb. Sideboards in painted and ebonized wood with leather panels and settles with canopies were decorated and painted in gilt by Kate Faulkner and John Henry Dearle.

The ‘Morris’ adjustable chair was designed in 1866 by Webb who adapted the design from a prototype discovered by Warrington Taylor, The Firm’s manager at the time. Available in plain or ebonized wood and with chintz or velvet upholstery, this piece was copied by Heals and Liberty, and also by Stickley, a furniture maker and exponent of the Arts and Crafts style in America. The popular ‘Morris’ chair was still in production in 1913.

EMBROIDERY

Whilst he was a student, Morris taught himself medieval stitch techniques by unpicking old embroideries. After completing the Daisy wall hangings at Red House, embroidery commissions became a significant part of the business, initially for church interiors but expanding to wealthy private households.

One of the first accolades The Firm achieved was awarded to Jane Morris for an embroidery entered in the 1862 International Exhibition, although critics were dubious about the demand for embroidered hangings in a middle-class market. Designs were often inspired by subjects from medieval manuscripts and were uncommercial with motifs that incorporated text with a moral message.

In later years Morris & Co. sold embroidery designed by Morris, his daughter May, and John Henry Dearle, as completed panels or as ‘kits’ to be worked on at home. In 1885, at the age of just 23, May Morris was put in charge of embroidery production. From her home at 8 Hammersmith Terrace, May and her team of female workers, mostly sisters or wives associated with the company, produced a wide variety of goods including fire-screens, workbags, cushion covers, folding screens, table linen and door curtains. She published Decorative Needlework in 1893 and with a lecture tour in America at the end of 1909 did much to raise the profile of this traditionally lowly art form.

GLASS

Commissions for stained glass church windows contributed much of the early output of The Firm and were carried out mainly by Burne-Jones and Madox Brown. The windows at St. Martins in Brampton, Cumbria are particularly stunning examples. They often used designs several times in different commissions – a figure of an angel in a church window may re-appear as a musician for example, minus wings, when used in a private house.

On a smaller scale, Philip Webb (who had designed drinking glasses for Red House) inspired an early range of Morris & Co. tableware made by James Powell’s glassworks in Whitefriars – the suppliers of glass for Burne-Jones’s windows. Morris also learnt the practice of glass blowing

RED HOUSE IS SOLD

‘IF A CHAP CAN’T COMPOSE AN EPIC POEM WHILE HE’S WEAVING A TAPESTRY, HE HAD BETTER SHUT UP….’

Webb had been asked by Morris to design an extension for Red House to accommodate their friends, the Burne-Joneses. However, following the tragic death of Georgiana Burne-Jones’s second son in the winter of 1864, aged only three weeks, they pulled out of the plan and the family moved to 41 Kensington Square with great sadness. Disillusioned by the collapse of his dream, William and Jane sold Red House and moved back to London in 1865, settling at 26 Queen Square with Jenny and May. The business, having outgrown its first premises, was also relocated to their new home.

Morris published a collection of poems with a strong anti-industrial message called ‘The Earthly Paradise’ in the late 1860s and it became an immediate best seller. He hand cut 50 woodblocks for the publication, a task no doubt aided by his experience working on blocks for wallpaper printing.

In 1871 he took out a joint lease on Kelmscott Manor in Lechlade, Gloucestershire, with Rossetti. The picturesque stone manor house provided his children with a retreat in summer holidays to enjoy freedom and fresh air. However, it was a tortuous place for Morris as it gave Rossetti and Jane a haven in which they could conduct their affair in privacy.

Morris had always been fascinated by the legends and myths of Iceland and Norway. He now absorbed himself in a new project by learning Old Icelandic so that he could read these stories in their original language and then translate them for publication in English. He made several trips to Iceland to visit sites from these old sagas.

MORRIS & CO.

‘MY WORK IS THE EMBODIMENT OF DREAMS’.

A poor business structure and internal animosity led William Morris to bring Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. to a close in 1875 and start anew under the name Morris & Co. This gave more control to fewer partners, with Edward Burne-Jones and Philip Webb continuing in their roles.

With the growing popularity of books, public lectures and articles offering advice on household management and good taste, a new type of consumer emerged in the second half of the 19th century. Until this time it was the role of the upholsterer to source papers on behalf of the client who often had little control of the choice. Seizing an opportunity, it wasn’t long before Morris pioneered a new type of retail experience offering a choice of ways to buy. Morris opened his first showroom (incorporating shop and office) at 449 Oxford Street in 1877 which brought the full range under one roof. Now the customer could visit the showroom personally.

In spacious and comfortable surroundings, the fabrics and wallpapers priced for the middle class market and upwards, were ‘presented’ on ‘Standbooks’ by well-informed showroom assistants, priced for the middle class market and upwards. A roll of wallpaper could be retrieved to show the client a larger piece before they made their choice. Customers could also take away a smaller ‘table book’ to decide at home.

Situated in this highly fashionable district, close to Liberty and Heals, people flocked to the showroom to buy the complete Morris & Co. ‘look’ including ceramics by William de Morgan, lighting by W.A.S. Benson and glass by James Powell, as well as smaller items such as photograph frames and embroidered bell-pulls, bags and cushions.

With a solid business format incorporating marketing and sales, customers could either rely on the full interior decorating service or buy via mail-order with confidence. Advice in the mail-order brochure was also designed to assist:

“You must decide for yourself whether the room most wants stability and repose, or if it is too stiff and formal. If repose be wanted, choose the pattern, other things being considered, which has a horizontal arrangement of its parts. If too great a rigidity be the fault, choose a pattern with soft easy line, either boldly circular or oblique wavy – say ‘Scroll’, ‘Vine’, ‘Pimpernel’, ‘Fruit’.”

Agents in America, Europe and Australia drove new business overseas and export sales rose dramatically despite the hefty duties imposed upon the shipments, such was the buying power of the international customers.

MERTON ABBEY MILLS

‘IT IS THE ALLOWING OF MACHINES TO BE OUR MASTERS AND NOT OUR SERVANTS THAT SO INJURES THE BEAUTY OF LIFE NOWADAYS.’

The mid 1870s marked the beginning of the most prolific decade in the history of Morris & Co. All the ranges were expanded and workshops were quickly outgrown. In 1881 William Morris acquired land with outbuildings at Merton Abbey in South London and relocated all the workshops to one location. The buildings were easily modified for the requirements of production. Morris had just become interested in printing his own textiles and Merton Abbey was situated on the River Wandle which had plentiful water, necessary for the hand dyeing and printing of fabrics. The good working conditions in a pleasant environment and above average pay meant the Merton Abbey Mills workers made a good living once they had been fully trained.

Manufacturing also encompassed carpets, tapestries, embroidery and stained glass.

CARPETS

In 1878 Morris gave up his London home in Queen Square and leased a new house in Hammersmith overlooking the Thames, naming it Kelmscott House. The hand-knotting of carpet was not practised in Britain at this time and Morris wanted to reintroduce the art and bring the beauty and mysteries of foreign lands to a British market. By studying Persian rugs, Morris honed his skills and techniques by making small rugs at home. He installed large looms in the coach house and stable at Kelmscott House and started producing ‘Hammersmith’ rugs in 1879, so-called to distinguish them from the cheaper ‘Kidderminster’, ‘Wilton’ and ‘Brussels’ machine-made carpets which Morris & Co. outsourced at the time.

At Merton Abbey, the looms were set up to be operated by six women who were expected to complete 2 inches per day. The work was slow and expensive but costs were off-set by savings made in the machine produced range.

TAPESTRY

In 1878 Morris installed a tapestry loom in his bedroom at Kelmscott House and embarked on what he called ‘the noblest of all the weaving arts’. After studying ancient textiles at the South Kensington Museum, Morris’s first project was ‘Acanthus and Vine’, which took 516 hours to complete. Always using naturally dyed yarns, tapestry weaving was established at Merton Abbey Mills and Morris appointed John Henry Dearle (1860-1932) to manage production. Dearle had joined the company in 1876 as a young assistant in the Oxford Street showroom. He became a trainee in the stained-glass studio and then moved into tapestry production.

Large tapestry commissions were often designed by Webb, Dearle and Morris in collaboration, and executed by their own experienced weavers on high-warp Flemish style looms which Morris had built. The ‘Forest Tapestry’, bought by the Greek merchant and patron of the arts, Alexander Ionides, at the 1890 Arts and Crafts Exhibition, hung in Ionides’s study in Holland Park. ‘The Quest for the Holy Grail’ was a large series of panels also completed in 1890. These expensive items were not very popular so smaller, affordable panels or cushions were available through the showroom and via overseas agents.

STAINED GLASS

Burne-Jones had become the chief designer of stained glass (creating over 100 drawings throughout his lifetime) and a separate area at Merton Abbey was allocated to his glass workshops. To assist with the scaling-up of drawings for huge works of art such as stained glass and tapestry, Morris made use of new technology and the expertise of the photographer Hollyer who provided the negatives for the copying of designs. Morris & Co. dominated British stained glass production during the 1870s and 1880s.

GEORGE JACK FURNITURE

Furniture production was relocated to Merton Abbey Mills in 1881 and then in 1890 to a factory in Pimlico, acquired from Holland & Son and managed by Webb’s assistant George Jack (1855-1931). Jack became chief designer for Morris & Co. the same year and was responsible for much of the in-laid cabinet and upholstered furniture produced.

After Morris’ death in 1896, George Jack and W.A.S. Benson ran the furniture operations and so began a gradual departure from Morris’ vision for simple medieval style furniture made popular by Webb. The fashion had changed to the more conservative Georgian style and so the business began producing more delicate mahogany and walnut furniture.

METALWORK

Morris preferred medieval inspired simple bare-brick fireplaces and free-standing grates, with copper hoods designed by Webb, as seen in Red House. The end of the 19th century saw a renewed interest in metalwork with visible construction, new enamelled copper and unfussy decoration. The established, fine metal-worker and cabinet maker, W.A.S. Benson, was asked to contribute to Morris & Co. Operating from his Fulham workshop and then moving into larger premises near the Morris & Co. showroom, he ventured into machine production after 1896.

With the arrival of electricity at the end of the 19th century, the opportunity for new light fittings became a lucrative area of development.

Throughout the 1880s Morris continued to make a significant contribution to the designs for wallpapers, creating 16 of the 21 patterns released by Morris & Co. in this decade alone, such as ‘Willow Boughs’, ‘Garden Tulip’ and ‘Bird & Anemone’.

The investment that secured and equipped Merton Abbey paid off as, within a few years, production was at its highest across all departments, and workers struggled to keep up with demand.

Morris handed control of Merton Abbey over to his assistant, John Henry Dearle, in the late 1880s. By this time Dearle was also designing wallpapers and fabrics and he produced some of Morris & Co.’s most enduring patterns, often attributed to Morris himself.

PRINTED TEXTILES

In 1868 The Firm issued three 1830s chintzes originating from Bannister Hall and had them block printed by Thomas Clarkson. Disappointed by the results and wanting to understand the processes involved, Morris experimented with vegetable and mineral dyes with Thomas Wardle in Staffordshire. He favoured natural dyes which aged beautifully and faded evenly which were in line with medieval practices. His first design was ‘Jasmine Trail’ circa 1870 but he favoured his second design ‘Tulip & Willow’ which was printed by Thomas Wardle in 1873.

With the acquisition of Merton Abbey Mills, Morris was able to start dyeing and printing his own textiles. He re-introduced the technique of indigo discharge block-printing, first with Prussian blue and then with indigo dyes. In this notoriously difficult method, the indigo is only activated when the cloth is lifted out of the dye bath and exposed to the air. Morris spent hours working with the printers, often with his arms dyed blue up to the elbows, until he achieved the right balance of colour. After the cloth is dyed, the design is block printed with a bleaching agent which lifts some of the blue to produce a paler tone and thereby creating a pattern. The plant, madder, was also used to create red fabrics in the same way.

Having mastered the art of pattern-making through his wallpaper designs, he was also able to understand how a pattern plays on a flat surface or as a pleated curtain.

Printed velveteen was popular in the second half of the 19th century and Morris & Co. produced a number of printed velvets which became popular as an upholstery fabric

WOVEN TEXTILES

Morris fully understood how to create texture when different yarns were mixed together and woven into cloth. Silk, wool and mohair were all used and Morris achieved spectacular results; sometimes patterns were also embellished with gold threads. However, most of the weaves were flat jacquards in wool and were popular for curtains and lining walls; Morris didn’t recommend their use for upholstery as the cloth tended to wear out quicker than chintz.

‘The Bird’ fabric, originally designed by Morris in 1877 for hanging in Kelmscott House, was a complicated, reversible double cloth constructed from two warps and two wefts. ‘Peacock & Dragon’ designed the same year was a popular and imposing flat weave. Sales were despatched to all corners of the world to a hungry market undeterred by the scale of the design which needed generously proportioned rooms to do the fabric justice.

Operated by hand, the jacquard looms partly automated the weaving process, but large commissions had to be outsourced to companies using steam powered looms who could fulfill orders quickly.

SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS, THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE AND THE KELMSCOTT PRES

With the operation of Merton Abbey Mills the responsibility of John Henry Dearle, Morris was free to pursue other interests. In an effort to combat the heavy-handed renovations of old churches spreading throughout the country, he co-founded with Philip Webb, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), which championed the sensitive restoration and conservation of ancient buildings. SPAB is still a significant force in heritage preservation and, like the National Trust, is a recognised and accepted part of life today, but at the time it was a radical idea shared only by a few pioneers.

Morris pursued his political interests and campaigned against poverty by joining the socialist movement and setting up The Socialist League in the 1880s. This revolutionary organisation rejected capitalism and Morris gave his support through public speaking and publishing newspapers to further the cause.

He returned to literary works and set up his own publishing company. The Kelmscott Press, formed in 1891, was based in Hammersmith, under the mentorship of Emery Walker, neighbour, friend and founder of the Doves Press. Beautifully illustrated by Burne-Jones, the books were printed and bound in the medieval style. The output of over 50 works was to be Morris’s opus and is widely regarded as the finest collection in the private press movement. The Kelmscott Press was dissolved in 1898.

A NEW ERA

William Morris died on 3rd October 1896 aged 62 and was buried in the churchyard near his favourite home, Kelmscott Manor, in Gloucestershire. Famously, one doctor at the time said ‘the disease is simply being William Morris and having done more work than most ten men.’

In his will he gave permission for Morris & Co. to be sold:

“I expressly empower my trustees to realise or postpone the realisation of my interest in the business of Morris & Co. I further authorise my trustees, either jointly or concurrently with the partners or surviving partner therein to sell the said business by private contract, tender or auction.”

Dearle continued to manage the Merton Abbey workshops, but overall control of the company went to W.A.S. Benson, with Frank and Robert Smith (long-standing business managers) in deputy roles. Tragically, just two years later, Edward Burne-Jones died and this combined loss brought a down-turn in the fortunes of Morris & Co.

Lacking strong leadership and creative direction, the company was sold in 1905 to Henry Currie Marillier who changed the name to Morris & Co. Decorators Ltd. With much of the artistic talents gone, the core principles were being eroded too. The board decided to launch five wallpaper designs printed by surface roller machines (‘Carnation’, ‘Merton’, ‘Oak Tree’, ‘Tomtit’ and ‘Thistle’) and although similar in appearance to hand block prints, it was a huge departure from the Morris vision. However, the decision proved profitable and the company enjoyed a brief uplift.

In 1911 the Royal Warrant was granted to Morris & Co. Decorators Ltd., in recognition of the many royal commissions undertaken over some 30 years.

In 1917 the Oxford Street showroom was moved to 17, George Street near Hanover Square, but war years limited resources for production and Merton Abbey was partially shut down. The fabric printing was outsourced to Stead McAlpin in Carlisle.

Prudent times inspired a move towards simplicity in decoration and saw the arrival of the first collection of Morris & Co. Plain Wallpapers. However, the production methods were geared only to bespoke wallpapers and the unnecessarily complicated process made these simple papers an expensive hand-finished product.

TURBULENT TIMES

With another name change in 1925 to Morris & Co. Art-workers Ltd, the business was still troubled by dwindling sales and a lack of available resources. With no new designers entering the workforce, they reproduced what they already had – still only five wallpapers as surface prints and the rest as hand block papers. They introduced services such as tapestry repair and even carpet cleaning to keep the interior decorating business going.

In 1926 Jeffrey and Co. was acquired by the Wallpaper Manufacturers Ltd. (WPM) to which Arthur Sanderson and Sons belonged, and the Jeffrey papers were sold through Sanderson’s Berners Street showroom. At that time the WPM controlled almost all the wallpaper manufacturing in the UK. One year later, production of all Jeffrey and Co. papers moved to Sanderson’s own factory in Chiswick, including block prints. After a fire the following year, all Morris & Co. log books, records and match pieces were moved again to Sanderson’s new wallpaper factory at Perivale, although it wasn’t fully operational until 1930.

In 1932 John Henry Dearle died. The last remaining member of Morris’s original team, Dearle had worked for the company for 54 years. The on-set of the Second World War and a reduced skilled labour force brought further pessimism about the future of the business.

SANDERSON BUYS MORRIS & CO.

On 21st March 1940, Morris & Co. Art-workers Ltd. entered voluntary liquidation. With Arthur Sanderson & Sons already managing the wallpaper printing, they seized an opportunity and bought the entire company for £400, including the George Street showroom and contents, all the wallpaper printing blocks, records, logbooks, stock and original samples.

As Sanderson continued to buy up several other UK manufacturers, it became clear that each brand, including Morris & Co., would be over-shadowed by Sanderson’s own. During World War II the Perivale factory was given over to the war effort to produce tents and camouflage. All capital expenditure ceased.

In 1945, in an attempt to bolster faith in UK production, the wallpaper industry instigated an exhibition with over 200 contributors. Sanderson chose to show ‘The Acanthus’, designed by Morris in 1895, which was featured in the exhibition catalogue.

THE FESTIVAL OF BRITAIN

Government granted permission to Sanderson to launch their first post-war pattern book in 1950, and this was shown at the 1951 Festival of Britain. Sanderson focused on exhibiting the huge breadth of product available using economical machine-printing methods.

Five Morris designs were incorporated into a Sanderson pattern book of surface printed wallpapers (the same five chosen by Marillier in 1905). Although at odds with the simplicity and modernity of the 1950s interior, and indeed the Sanderson house style, Sanderson continued to market the rather unfashionable Morris designs.

THE SWINGING SIXTIES

The Arts and Crafts style did find its place alongside the eclecticism of tastes and looks in the 1960s and started influencing design. It was now that Sanderson, perhaps emboldened by reaching their centenary year, began block printing Morris wallpapers re-coloured by the studio in psychedelic hues.

The newly appointed Fabric Design Manager, George Lowe, from the Wall Paper Manufacturers Ltd., decided to launch a new range of five stunning screen-printed fabrics, in tandem with the wallpapers, and were sold directly to Heals and Habitat. Previously only available on paper, the designs were ‘Marigold’, ‘Vine’, ‘Chrysanthemum’, ‘Golden Lily’ and ‘Bachelors Button’ and were shown among known fabrics such as ‘Brer Rabbit’ and ‘Willow Bough’. A green and turquoise colourway of ‘Bachelors Button’ was shown on the front cover of the Sanderson company magazine Vista. The Berners Street showroom even wore clothing in the fabrics and the dressed room sets became more daring in their presentation of the Morris brand.

With the wallpaper factory in Perivale and the fabric printing mills in Uxbridge producing separate ‘Morris’ collections, albeit branded under Sanderson, the Morris name took on a new lease of life matched by growing demand.

Furnishing fabrics started to out-sell wallpaper for the first time, owing to two key factors. The introduction of the Clean Air Act for household fuels meant homeowners no longer needed to regularly redecorate their pollution damaged walls. The continuing trend for the simple Scandinavian look called for painted rather than papered walls. Sanderson’s ‘Our Man’ advertising campaign – a marketing strategy in the 1960s – cited that as Morris was a ‘great artist’ and ‘genius’ Sanderson ‘consider it a privilege to give his designs wider circulation’. Trying to inspire new interest in the wallpapers, they proudly promoted the authenticity of the product, hand-printed in ‘modern colour ways’ using the original wood blocks.

With the screen printed fabrics thriving in the marketplace and a Victoriana revival filtering down through popular culture and fashion, as well as design, Sanderson began to publicise the ranges in non-commercial areas and approached the William Morris Society, established in 1955. The Society printed advertisements promoting the new block printed wallpapers in its Journal but one wonders at the reaction of the unusual Morris look among his devotees.

THE 1970S

The high costs of producing the Morris block printed wallpapers caused overheads to rise at Perivale so the factory tried to ease the strain on the business by undertaking profitable commissions and offering bespoke colourways. They also adapted some wood block designs into screen prints to reduce labour costs.

Despite advertising, wallpaper sales were being left behind by the demand for furnishing fabric which was only exacerbated by the significant arrival of a second Morris fabric collection in 1975. A new brown colourway of ‘Golden Lily’, designed by John Henry Dearle in 1899, saw sales reaching 5,000 metres per month. As with ‘Chrysanthemum’, designed by Morris in 1877, their phenomenal success in the 1970s has kept the designs in the public conscience, and in the pattern books, ever since.

Celebrity endorsement was prevalent in the advertising campaigns of the 1970s, featuring personalities such as Joan Bakewell in her home, decorated in Morris’s 1897 design ‘Net Ceiling’.

Sanderson’s own revolutionary ‘Triad’ coordinated range, first launched in 1962, had been so successful it secured Sanderson’s place at the forefront of the UK furnishings industry. Triad (now called ‘Options’) brought fabrics and wallpapers together in one book and in the 1970s started to include Morris designs, such as ‘Blackthorn’, ‘Rose’ and ‘Myrtle’. Another first was the inclusion of photography on the cover and inside the pattern books. With well-designed layouts, the books helped the consumer easily achieve the coordinated look, a popular interiors trend in the 1970s and 80s.

Sanderson released yet more vibrant colourways of Morris designs in a new ‘Heritage Collection’ wallpaper pattern book in the late 1970s, which appeared alongside patterns by C.F.A. Voysey and Owen Jones. With hand block and screen printed wallpaper sales already floundering, the book was unable to cause any reprieve and even damaged their reputation among Morris purists.

THE 1980S AND 1990S

With slowing demand for wallpapers, the Perivale factory shut; however, a small block printing unit remained until the late 1980s. With the arrival of A. L. Taylor as Chief Executive in 1982, Sanderson Wallcoverings and Sanderson Fabrics divisions were consolidated into one business, thereby streamlining costs and combining resources, sales and the design studios. Marketing became the driving force behind a more cohesive business strategy which focussed on the Sanderson brand rather than a need to be multifarious.

An archive was built at Uxbridge specially designed to house the vast resource of Sanderson and Morris original samples, log books and reference material. Invaluable to the design studio and marketing teams, the archive has become a cornerstone of Morris & Co. today.

Michael Parry replaced George Lowe as Design Manager in 1982. Previously in the role of Merchandising Manager, Parry instigated the move to sever Morris & Co. from Sanderson, resurrecting its own brand identity for the first time in 45 years, beginning with the release of Morris & Co. block printed wallpapers authentically reproduced from the originals. More significantly, at the same time, Parry arranged to have long-established block-print designs transferred onto surface rollers which were printed by Fiona Wallpapers in Denmark. Technology had advanced considerably since Morris’s time and by slowing the rollers down, Parry achieved a good quality and competitively priced machine printed wallpaper with the appearance of a block print.

The arrival of the first book of coordinated Morris & Co. machine-printed fabrics and wallpapers in 1984 was launched at a new ‘Morris Room’ at the Berners Street showroom. High demand led to subsequent volumes of the co-coordinated books which in turn ensured the future success of the Morris & Co. business.

By the end of the 1980s, the Morris & Co. brand was extricated from Sanderson completely, and marketed separately to strengthen both names within the UK furnishings industry. In a 1991 survey, public perception held Sanderson as market leader whilst Marks & Spencer, John Lewis, Morris & Co. and Liberty were not far behind.

Opportunities to bring more Morris pattern into the home inspired several lucrative licensing deals with partners in the UK and America. ‘Willow Bough’, a design from 1887, was now available as bedlinen, tableware, block printed wallpaper, printed textile, printed sheer, upholstery jacquard, tapestry and in 1990 as a surface printed wallpaper.

The small wallpaper block-printing unit at Perivale was moved up to Lancashire when a new factory was acquired. With the local workforce trained in the art of hand printing paper, another collection was launched in 1990. Gradually and strategically, the Sanderson name was removed from all Morris & Co. merchandise and advertising, and by 1995 Sanderson had ceased to include any Morris patterns in its own collections.

THE 21ST CENTURY

In 2003 Sanderson and Morris & Co. were purchased by Walker Greenbank PLC, headed by John Sach. Production was moved again, this time to the Group’s own mills: wallpaper manufacture to Anstey in Loughborough and fabric printing to Standfast and Barracks in Lancaster. Heavy investment in the UK and export markets, together with strong advertising and increased stock, invigorated sales.

Since 2000 Morris & Co. have been releasing fabric and wallpaper collections approximately every two years and in 2007, after nearly a century, re-introduced embroidery.

Morris & Co. celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2011 with a new collection of archive based prints, weaves, embroidered fabrics and surface-printed wallpapers, along with new designs inspired by the life and work of William Morris and his circle.

The current craft revival movement, and on-going interest in our design heritage, means the Morris & Co. brand continues to reach new audiences and find new markets as support for British manufacturing industries grows.

Morris & Co. fabrics and wallpapers are supplied through high quality interior designers or found at department stores and retailers throughout the UK. Royalties from licensees continue to make a significant contribution to profits, whilst international sales represent almost 40% of the Company’s turnover with major markets established in over 60 countries worldwide including Japan, Australasia, the United States and Russia. These sales are driven by an experienced network of agents and distributors, some of whom Sanderson have worked with for over 40 years.

Hidden London : William Morris Gallery & Home, Set in Lloyd Park & Gardens and the start of the Iconic Liberty Fabrics and Wallpaper Designs.

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William Morris Gallery

The William Morris Gallery, opened by Prime Minister Clement Attlee in 1950, is the only public museum devoted to English Arts and Crafts designer and early socialist William Morris. The gallery is located at Walthamstow in Morris’s family home from 1848 to 1856, the former Water House, a substantial Grade II* listed Georgian dwelling of about 1750 which is set in its own extensive grounds (now Lloyd Park). The Gallery underwent major redevelopment and reopened in August 2012; in 2013 it won the national prize for Museum of the Year.

Collections

The gallery’s collections illustrate Morris’ life, work and influence. They include printed, woven and embroidered fabrics, rugs, carpets, wallpapers, furniture, stained glass and painted tiles designed by Morris himself and by Edward Burne-Jones, Philip Webb, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, and others who together founded the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company in 1861.

Outstanding exhibits include: Morris’ medieval-style helmet and sword, made as ‘props’ for the Pre-Raphaelite murals at the Oxford Union; the original design for the Trellis wallpaper (the earliest of Morris’ many wallpapers); the Woodpecker tapestry woven at Morris’ Merton Abbey workshops; the Beauty and the Beast and Labours of the Months tile panels; and The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer printed at Morris’ Kelmscott Press. Other exhibits – such as the satchel in which Morris carried his Socialist pamphlets, or the coffee cup he used on his weekly visits to the Burne-Joneses – provide a more personal glimpse of his busy life.

The gallery also holds a substantial collection of furniture, textiles, ceramics and glass by Morris’ followers in the Arts and Crafts movement, which flourished from the 1880s to the 1920s. Among those represented are Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo and the Century Guild, William De Morgan, May Morris, Ernest Gimson, Sidney Barnsley, George Jack, C. F. A. Voysey, Harry Powell, Selwyn Image, Henry Holiday, and Christopher Whall.

The collections of applied art are complemented by the Brangwyn Gift, comprising paintings, drawings and prints by Morris’ former student Sir Frank Brangwyn as well as works by the Pre-Raphaelites and other Victorian and later artists.

Redevelopment

In 2007, the museum faced a closure threat after its opening hours were cut back as a cost-cutting exercise, breaking a stipulation of gifts by Sir Frank Brangwyn, that works should be on view for a minimum amount of time weekly. Campaigners against the cuts included former Culture Secretary Chris Smith. Subsequently a major redevelopment was carried out.

The William Morris Gallery is owned and managed by Waltham Forest Council. In March 2009 the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded the gallery £80,000 to enable detailed proposals to be developed. In Autumn 2010 this proposal was successful in securing round-two funding of £1.523 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund, which was matched with £1.5 million from the London Borough of Waltham Forest. Further funding was secured from charitable trusts and foundations, notably the Friends of the William Morris Gallery, and through an ongoing public fundraising campaign. Redevelopment of the building and collections finally started in 2011 and after just over a year’s closure, reopened on 2 August 2012.[7] For the first month, Grayson Perry’s fifteen-metre long Walthamstow Tapestry was on display.

The redevelopment of Water House and was designed by architects and exhibition designers Pringle Richards Sharratt. A new wing, designed to sit comfortably next to the early Georgian architecture of William Morris’s house, succeeds in doing so by using similar details – handmade brick with sash windows and gauged brick arches – in a contrasting red brick. The new space houses a new gallery space for temporary exhibitions, toilets and a café with a balcony overlooking the gardens to the rear. The permanent displays and educational areas were completely rearranged, and the project also provides a learning and research centre on the top floor, offices in the basement. New learning programmes and a dedicated website were developed alongside the physical changes.

Lloyd Park

The gardens of the house, now known as Lloyd Park, notably include a moat which pre-dates the Georgian house. As part of the 2012 redevelopment, the disused Waltham Forest Theatre located inside the moat was demolished and made into part of the park. Parts of the park were newly landscaped. A skate park and a new café and gallery space in the adjoining Aveling Park were built as part of the same redevelopment project, replacing similar run-down facilities.

A lot to see without losing any of the original integrity of the place, well worth a visit.

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