William Morris

 

William Morris, an English designer, craftsman, poet, and early socialist, was born on March 24, 1834, in Walthamstow, near London, England, and died on October 3, 1896, in Hammersmith, near London. His designs for furniture, fabrics, stained glass, wallpaper, and other decorative arts sparked the Arts and Crafts movement in England and revolutionised Victorian taste.

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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