Education and the beginning of a career
Morris was born into a large and well-to-do
family in an Essex village on the southern outskirts of Epping Forest. At the
age of 13, he transferred to Marlborough College from his preparatory school. A
classmate described him as “a thick-set, strong-looking boy, with a strong
colour and black curly hair, good-natured and kind, but with a terrifying anger”
at the time. Morris later stated that he learned "next to nothing... in
fact, close to nothing was taught" at Marlborough. He learnt only what he
wanted to study, as he did later in life.
Morris enrolled at the University of Oxford's
Exeter College in 1853, when he met Edward Jones (later the painter and
designer Burne-Jones), who would become a longtime companion. The Oxford
movement in the Church of England influenced both Morris and Jones, and it was
anticipated that they would become clerics. Nonetheless, it was art critic John
Ruskin's studies on the social and moral foundations of architecture
(especially the chapter "On the Nature of Gothic" in The Stones of
Venice) that came as a "revelation" to Morris. He entered the Oxford
office of Gothic Revivalist architect G.E. Street after receiving his degree in
1856.He also funded the first 12 monthly editions of The Oxford and Cambridge
Magazine in the same year, where many of the poems that would eventually be
reproduced in his astonishing first published work, The Defence of Guenevere
and Other Poems, initially appeared.
Morris' love of mediaeval art was strengthened
during trips to Belgium and northern France with Street and Burne-Jones, where
he first encountered the 15th-century paintings of Hans Memling and Jan and
Hubert Van Eyck, as well as the churches of Amiens, Chartres, and Rouen. At
this time, he was swayed by the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, who persuaded him to abandon architecture in favour of painting and
enrolled him among a group of friends who were painting scenes from Arthurian
legend based on Sir Thomas Malory's 15th-century English novel Le Morte Darthur
on the walls of the Oxford Union. Morris only left one easel painting: La Belle
Iseult, or Queen Guenevere (1858). Jane Burden, the gorgeous and intriguing
daughter of an Oxford groom, served as his model. In 1859, he married her, but
the union proved to be a source of dissatisfaction for both of them. Morris is
described as "a short square man with spectacles and a big mop of dark
hair" in the diaries of the painter Val Prinsep around this time. It was
said, "How decisive he was: how precise, without any effort or formality;
what an incredible power of observation was at the foundation of many of his
casual or incidental remarks," it was said.Morris shared a studio with
Burne-Jones in London's Red Lion Square from 1856 to 1859, for which he
designed "some highly mediaeval furniture," according to Rossetti.
Morris commissioned the architect Philip Webb,
whom he had met in Street's office, to build the Red House at Bexleyheath after
his marriage (so called because it was built of red brick when the fashion was
for stucco villas). Morris and his associates came up with the concept of
forming an organisation of "fine art artisans" while furnishing and
decorating this property, which became the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner
& Company in April 1861, with offices in Red Lion Square. Ford Madox Brown,
Rossetti, Webb, and Burne-Jones were the other members of the firm.They
displayed stained glass, furniture, and embroideries at the 1862 International
Exhibition in South Kensington. This resulted in commissions to adorn G.F.
Bodley's new churches, including St. Martin's-on-the-Hill in Scarborough. The
beautiful sequence of stained-glass windows planned by Burne-Jones for Jesus
College Chapel in Cambridge during the next decade, with the ceiling painted by
Morris and Webb, is the peak of the firm's ornamental work. Morris was given
uncolored plans for these windows, and it was he who chose the colors and added
the lead lines. He also designed a number of other windows, both for household
and ecclesiastical purposes.
Jenny and May were born in 1861 and 1862,
respectively, and Morris's five years at Red House were the happiest of his
life. After a severe case of rheumatic disease spurred on by overwork, he
relocated to Bloomsbury, London, in 1865. The firm's workshops took up the
majority of his new home, which, when combined with her husband's noisy manners
and Rossetti's fascination with her, reduced Jane to a neurotic invalidism.
Morris's first wallpaper designs, "Trellis," "Daisy," and
"Fruit," or "Pomegranate," were created between 1862 and
1864; his mature style did not emerge until the "Jasmine" and
"Marigold" papers ten years later.
Socialism and Iceland
Morris rose to prominence as a poet with The
Life and Death of Jason (1867), a love narrative, which was quickly followed by
The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), a collection of narrative poems based on
classical and mediaeval sources. The introductory poems on the months, in which
Morris confesses his inner sadness, are the best parts of The Earthly Paradise.
The epic Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876),
composed after a long study of the sagas (mediaeval prose narratives) read by
Morris in the original Old Norse, reflects a sterner attitude.The magnificently
decorated A Book of Verse, dedicated to Georgina Burne-Jones and telling of
hopeless love once more, dates from 1870.
Morris and Rossetti leased the Elizabethan
manor house of Kelmscott in Oxfordshire together in 1871. Morris travelled to
Iceland for the first time the same year, and his travel log has some of his
most vivid descriptive writing. In 1873, he returned to Iceland. The shared
tenancy of Kelmscott, on the other hand, was never a success, and when
Rossetti's health finally failed him in 1874, he departed the house for good,
much to Morris' relief. Morris & Company was formed the next year when the
firm was reformed under his sole ownership. Morris also began his innovative
experiments with vegetable dyes in 1875, which produced the firm's finest
printed and woven fabrics, carpets, and tapestries after the firm moved to
larger facilities at Merton Abbey in Surrey in 1881. Morris' first public
lecture, "The Decorative Arts" (later renamed "The Lesser
Arts"), was given in 1877, and his first collection of lectures, Hopes and
Fears for Art, was published in 1882. In 1877, he also created the Society for
the Protection of Ancient Buildings in an effort to resist the harsh repair
procedures that were then being used on Great Britain's cathedrals and parish
churches.
In 1879, the Morris family moved to Hammersmith's
Kelmscott Seat (named after their country house in Oxford shire). After joining
Henry Mayer's Hyndman's Democratic (later Social Democratic) Federation five
years later, Morris began his continuous tours of industrial districts to
propagate the socialist gospel. Even after leading a banned rally to London's
Trafalgar Plaza on "Bloody Sunday" (November 13, 1887), when the
police, backed up by the military, cleansed the square of demonstrators, he was
greeted with respect by the government. He marched beside dramatist George
Bernard Shaw on this occasion.Morris, meanwhile, had split from the dictatorial
Hyndman Federation and founded the Socialist League, which had its own journal,
The Commonweal, in which he published his two best romances, A Dream of John
Ball (1886–87) and News from Nowhere (1890), an idyllic picture of a socialist
rural utopia. He went on to form the Hammersmith Socialist Society, which held
weekly lectures in the coach house next door to Kelmscott House and open-air
meetings throughout London.
The Kelmscott Press:
Between 1891 and 1898, the Kelmscott Press
produced 53 works in 66 volumes, with printer and type designer Emery Walker
serving as typographic adviser. Morris created three type styles for his press:
Golden type, based on Nicolas Jenson, a 15th-century French printer; Troy type,
a gothic font based on the early German printers of the 15th century; and
Chaucer type, a smaller variant of Troy, in which Morris printed The Works of
Geoffrey Chaucer during his final years. Chaucer is the most ornate of the
Kelmscott publications, and one of the greatest examples of the art of the
printed book. The majority of Kelmscott's other volumes were straightforward
and simple, as Morris noted, because 15th-century publications were "always
attractive by force of sheer type."
Death and evaluation
Morris's fading energy was not revived by a sea
excursion to Norway in the summer of 1896, and he died that autumn after coming
home, exhausted by his many pursuits. In the Kelmscott churchyard, he was laid
to rest beneath a simple monument built by Webb.Morris is now considered as a
modern and visionary thinker, despite his preference for romance, myth, and
epic over what he called "the boring dirt of civilisation." Morris,
following Ruskin, described beauty in art as the consequence of man's delight
in his labour and queried, "How can people care about art unless they care
about going about their profession without making the world hideous?"
Morris considered the entire man-made environment to be art.William Morris was
most known in his own time as the author of The Earthly Paradise and for his
wallpaper, textile, and carpet designs. Morris has been hailed as a designer
and artisan since the mid-twentieth century. Future generations may remember
him as a social and moral critic, a forerunner of an egalitarian society.
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