Carpet, 622.9 × 465.2 cm.
Private collection.
2 – Morris And His Plea For An Industrial Commonwealth
“The growth of decorative art in this country […] has now reached a point at which it seems desirable that artists of reputation should devote their time to it.”
William Morris, Hammersmith carpet.
Private collection.
By the middle of the century Ruskin, following the tracks of Thomas Carlyle, had created a certain discipleship, and were receiving the unbounded admiration of young men of fervent and poetic temperament, who were probably drawn at first by the splendid rhetoric of Past and Present and Modern Painters without examining very closely their social implications. Chief among the admirers of Ruskin was William Morris, his junior by fifteen years. Morris was just entering Oxford as Ruskin was publishing the Stones of Venice, the book that first kindled in Morris his social beliefs, to which he always referred as the first statement of the doctrine that art is the expression of man’s pleasure in labour. He reprinted the chapter On the Nature of the Gothic forty years after its first publication as one of the first products of the Kelmscott Press, to stand in testimony of the abiding influence of the master-thinker. Of narrower range than Ruskin, but more intensive in his own direction, Morris gave his life to the determination of the relation between art and labour, and made himself, therefore, the chief exponent of the idea of the Arts and Crafts. Ruskin theorised; Morris demonstrated: henceforth the problem of other workers is that of extension and inclusion.
“Poet, artist, manufacturer, and socialist” – these terms describe the life-work of Morris in in its three-fold aspect of artist, craftsman, and social reformer. The history of handicraft shows no life more eventful than Morris’s, nor more filled with notable achievements. As a boy his hands were always active, net-making being a favourite diversion. It was foreseen that he would take up the pencil and the engraver’s tool at the earliest opportunity of instruction, although he was matriculated at Oxford for holy orders. His college chum, Burne-Jones – also intended for the church, but even then practicing the art through which he was to become famous – taught him drawing and engraving. The two artists were soon considering the advisability of giving up the church and devoting their lives to art – the one aspiring to be a painter, the other an architect.
Charles F. A. Voysey (for the design) and Donegal Carpets (for the production), The Rose, Donegal carpet, 1899.
Wool.
Private collection.
The Silver Studio (for the design) and woven for Liberty’s, The Fintona, Donegal carpet, c. 1902.
Wool.
Private collection.
To architecture forthwith Morris turned his attention, and while he never worked professionally as an architect, his studies at this time were of immense service in clarifying his thought and concentrating his energies. While in the office of Mr. G. E. Street, and pursuing his studies in architecture, he began the practice of more than one handicraft – clay-modelling, wood and stone carving, manuscript illumination, window-designing and embroidery, and these occupations were soon to fill his days even to the exclusion of painting, which Rossetti had taught him, and of poetry, which was his native expression.
The beginning of Morris’s work as a professional decorator and manufacturer occurred in 1857. Practicing painting under the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s direction, experimenting in mural decoration on the walls of the Oxford Union Society, feeling his way in various arts and handicrafts, preparing also The Defence of Guinevere for publication, here was evidence of a splendid general culture, which, when specialised, was destined to accomplish grand results. In 1859 and 1860 Morris and Philip Webb, just out of the architect’s office, built the famous Red House in an orchard and meadow plot near London, carrying out in practice for the first time their theories of domestic building and decoration. These first steps were so important that Morris’s biographer J. W. Mackail’s account of the house may be quoted in full:
“It was planned as an L-shaped building, two-storied, with a high-pitched roof of red tile. The beautiful oak staircase filled a bold projection in the angle, and corridors ran from it along both the inner walls, so that the rooms on both limbs of the house faced outward onto the garden. The two other sides of this half-quadrangle were masked by rose-trellises, inclosing a square inner court, in the middle of which rose the most striking architectural feature of the building, a well-house of brickwork and oak timber, with a steep, conical, tiled roof. Externally the house was plain almost to severity, and depended for its effect on its solidity and fine proportion. The decorative features it possessed were constructional, not of the nature of applied ornament: the frankly emphasised relieving arches over the windows, the deep cornice moulding, the louvre in the high, open roof over the staircase, and the two spacious recessed porches. Inside, its most remarkable feature was the large drawing-room, which filled the external angle of the L on the upper floor. It looked by its main end window northwards toward the road and the open country, and a projecting oriel on the western side overlooked the long bowling-green, which ran, encircled with apple-trees, close under the length of that wing. The decoration of the room, and of the staircase by which it was reached, was to be the work of several years for Morris and his friends, and he boldly announced that he meant to make it the most beautiful room in England. But through the whole house, inside and out, the same standard was, so far as possible, to be kept up.
Probably created by Gavin Morton, Donegal carpet with a Turkish inspired design, c. 1899.
Private collection.
Charles F. A. Voysey (for the design) and Ginzkey (for the production), design for a carpet.
Printed card.
William Morris, bed cover, c. 1876.
Linen embroidered with silks, 190.5 × 166.4 cm.
Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Charles F. A. Voysey, The Glenmure, Donegal carpet, 1903.
Kidderminster’s Carpet Heritage, Kidderminster.
It was at this point that the problem of decoration began. The bricklaying and carpentery could be executed directly from the architect’s designs. But when the shell of the house was completed, and stood clean and bare among the apple-trees, everything – or nearly everything – that was to furnish or decorate it had to be likewise designed and made. Only in a few isolated cases, such as Persian carpets and blue china or delft for vessels of household use, was there anything then to be bought ready-made that Morris could be content with in his own house. Not a chair, or table, or bed; not a cloth or paper-hanging for the walls; nor tiles to line fireplaces or passages; nor a curtain or a candlestick. These had to be reinvented, one might almost say, to escape the flat ugliness of the current article. The great painted settle from Red Lion Square was taken and set up in the drawing room, the top of it being railed in so as to form a small music gallery. Much of the furniture was designed by Webb and executed under his eye: the great oak dining table, other tables, chairs, cupboards, massive copper candlesticks, fire-dogs, and table glass of extreme beauty. The plastered walls and ceilings were treated with simple designs in tempera, and for the hall and main living rooms a richer and more elaborate scheme of decoration was designed and gradually executed. The garden was planned with the same care and originality as the house; in both alike the study of older models never sank into mere antiquarianism or imitation of obsolete forms. Morris’s