In 1864, watercolours including the Merciful Knight (1863) earned him election to the Royal Watercolour Society. His adored daughter Margaret was born in 1866, and she became his confidante and a frequent model for his paintings. In 1870, after a conflict, Burne-Jones stepped down from the Royal Watercolour Society. His affair with Mary Zambaco, one of his models, provoked a scandal, and these successive problems incited him to retire to Fulham, west London.
Two successive voyages in Italy in 1871 and 1873 enriched his knowledge of the High Renaissance. In 1877 he triumphed at the Grosvenor Gallery with The Beguiling of Merlin and The Mirror of Venus. In 1886 he took part in the annual exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society, where he exhibited numerous works created for Morris. These works attained high prices at auction, and people began to collect his designs.
In 1889, after his success at the Paris Universal Exhibition, he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur by the French government, and in 1894 he was raised to the baronetcy by the Queen. In 1895, though already ill, he executed fifty-seven illustrations for the The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, published by Morris’ Kelmscott Press. However, his health was slowly failing him and in 1898 he died of cardiac arrest.
Edward Burne-Jones,
Clara von Bork 1560, 1860.
Watercolour and gouache, 34.2 x 17.9 cm.
Tate Britain, London.
William Morris, La Belle Iseult, 1858.
Oil on canvas, 71.8 x 50.2 cm.
Tate Gallery, London.
Anonymous, Portrait of William Morris.
Private Collection.
William Morris
(Walthamstow, 1834 - Kelmscott, 1896)
William Morris was a designer, poet, decorator, writer, and architect. He was the third of nine children of William Morris, a rich Lombard Street broker, and his wife Emma. He learned to read very early, and at four years old he was already familiar with all of Sir Walter Scott’s novels. He studied with his sisters’ governess and went to school for the first time at nine years old. In 1848, after the death of his father, William entered Marlborough College, where he was influenced by the Oxford Movement. It was in this same year that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded.
In 1853 he went to Exeter College in Oxford at the same time as his friend Edward Burne-Jones, intending to enter the priesthood. Both belonged to a circle of aesthetes fascinated by an idealised vision of the Middle Ages, whose purpose was to “lead a crusade and a holy war against the contemporary era.” The members of this small group called themselves a brotherhood and read books together on theology, ecclesiastical history, and medieval poetry, as well as Tennyson’s poems and the writings of Ruskin. In 1855, still accompanied by Burne-Jones, he took a tour of the great Gothic cathedrals of northern France, and the two friends abandoned the priesthood to fully devote themselves to art. In early 1856 Morris began an apprenticeship with the architect George Edmund Street, during which he met his future collaborator Philip Webb. At the same time, he founded The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine and met Rossetti, who incited him to immediately abandon architecture for painting.
In 1857 he participated in the decoration of the Oxford Union Library’s walls. This was also the year that Morris met the woman who would be his wife and muse, Jane Burden. She was also one of Rossetti’s preferred models. In 1858 he published his story The Defence of Guenevere, which is now considered to be one of the most beautiful Victorian poems. The next year he married Jane Burden, and in 1859 they moved into the Red House designed for them by Philip Webb. After fitting out the house, Morris decided in 1861 to establish a decorating business with Rossetti, Webb, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown, Faulkner and Marshall. Morris and Burne-Jones were the firm’s principal designers but the entire Pre-Raphaelite community worked there, along with Arthur Hughes and William de Morgan.
In parallel with his decorating work, Morris began studying the Icelandic language in 1868, and with Eiríkr Magnússon he published his first translations of Icelandic sagas, The Saga of Gunnlaug Worm-Tongue and The Story of Grettir the Strong. Between 1868 and 1870 he published the four parts of The Earthly Paradise. After these accomplishments in decoration and literature, Morris became interested in politics. For him, the Socialist movement seemed to be the only solution to the problems of Victorian society, particularly the complications emerging from the industrial revolution.
In 1871 Morris and Rossetti became co-proprietors of Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire. Rossetti was very close to “Topsy”, his nickname for William, and Jane Morris, with whom he had an affair. In 1874 Morris took sole possession of Kelmscott without Rossetti, and for purely commercial reasons became the sole owner of the firm, known thereafter as Morris & Co.
Though he was becoming more and more involved in politics, he found time in 1875 to publish Sigurd the Volsung and Fall of the Nibelungs. In 1877 he founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and gave his first public lecture on the decorative arts. In 1884 Morris wrote numerous essays on socialism that were read throughout England and Scotland. In the same year, he left the Social Democratic Federation and founded the Socialist League. In 1891 he founded the Kelmscott Press in Hammersmith, which published the Kelmscott Chaucer in 1896. This book was typeset by Morris and illustrated by Burne-Jones, and is an outstanding example of Morris’ ideas. He was skilled at combining beauty and utility in everyday objects, and though he was a poor painter, he helped to promote the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of beauty through his work. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, he fought for a more beautiful world, a return to the aesthetics of the Middle Ages, and a more demanding attitude towards the art objects that surround us. He died in 1896 and was buried in the cemetery of Kelmscott village.
William Morris,
The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1896.
Book published by Kelmscott Press.
Paper, 42.5 x 29.2 cm (page).
Art Gallery and Museum, Cheltenham.
William Morris and John Henry Dearle (design)
and Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (production),
The Orchard, or The Seasons, c. 1863.
Tapestry woven in wool, silk and mohair on a
cotton warp, 221 x 472 cm.
Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Index
A
Anonymous
Portrait of Burne-Jones and Morris.
Portrait of William Morris.
B
Brett, John
Glacier of Rosenlaui.