Hand painted cup

Details

Date: 1913
Object Type: ceramic
Technique: hand-painted
Catalogue number: C250
Designer: Jack, Margery (1894 - 1974)
Credit notes: Presented by June Randall, 2002

Margery Jack was the daugher of George Jack, Arts and Crafts architect and designer of furniture for Morris and Co., and Annie Jack, a skillled embroiderer. Margery and her twin sister Jessie were encouraged to be creative from a young age and this hand painted bowl was made when Margery was 19 years old. The floral decoration is handpainted in overglaze enamels on a white earthenware blank made by Wedgwood. Both Margery and Jessie studied at LCC Central School of Arts & Crafts where they attended the painting on china course. The course encouraged economic self-sufficency, students would purchase Wedgwood blanks from the college which they would decorate and fire in their kilns, students were then able to sell or keep the finished items.

Details

Dimensions: 15.2 x 15.2
Object Type: ceramic
Technique: hand-painted
Catalogue number: C217.1
Manufacturer: Morris & Co.
Credit notes: Presented by Michael Whiteway, 1996

Tiles and table glass were a popular and financially important aspect of Morris and Co.’s early output. Despite Morris’s belief that works of art should, as far as possible, be designed and executed by a single craftsperson, ceramics was one of the few areas in which he did not have personal artisanal expertise. Instead, he purchased blank tiles from the Netherlands. According to Jennifer Hawkins Opie: “…white, undecorated tiles ordered from Dutch manufacturers arrived at the Morris works in London ready glazed and fired. These were then decorated by the painters of stained glass already employed by Morris. Of necessity, this was done in enamel colours and this ‘on-glaze’ decoration was fired (a second firing for the tin glaze), initially alongside the enamel-decorated stained glass in the firm’s own kilns in the basement of Red Lion Square.”
This ‘Bay and Willow’ pattern is typical of Morris’s interest in natural, botanical forms. In many cases, individual tiles could be combined to create larger pictorial and decorative schemes.

Details

Dimensions: 8.2 x 22.8
Object Type: ceramic
Material: stoneware
Catalogue number: C174
Maker: Martin, Robert Wallace (1843 - 1923)
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1968

Details

Dimensions: 7.6
Object Type: ceramic
Material: earthenware
Catalogue number: C99
Designer and maker: Martin, Robert Wallace (1843 - 1923)
Credit notes: Miss E Pugh bequest, 1963

Details

Date: 1875
Dimensions: 13.9 x 8.8
Object Type: ceramic
Material: stoneware
Catalogue number: C97
Designer: Martin, Robert Wallace (1843 - 1923)
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1962

Details

Dimensions: 3.3 x 8.3 x 8.3
Object Type: ceramic
Material: stoneware
Catalogue number: C39
Designer and maker: R W Martin, London and Southall
Credit notes: Mackmurdo bequest, 1942

Details

Date: 1875
Dimensions: 24.1 x 12.7
Object Type: ceramic
Material: stoneware
Catalogue number: C36
Designer and maker: R W Martin, London and Southall
Credit notes: Mackmurdo bequest, 1942

Details

Date: 1887
Dimensions: 21.5 x 22.8
Object Type: ceramic
Material: stoneware
Catalogue number: C35
Designer and maker: R W Martin, London and Southall
Credit notes: Mackmurdo bequest, 1942

Details

Date: 1886
Dimensions: 21.5 x 14.4
Object Type: ceramic
Material: stoneware
Catalogue number: C34
Designer and maker: R W Martin, London and Southall
Credit notes: Mackmurdo bequest, 1942

Details

Date: 1887
Dimensions: 18.5 x 15.2
Object Type: ceramic
Material: stoneware
Catalogue number: C33
Designer and maker: R W Martin, London and Southall
Credit notes: Mackmurdo bequest, 1942

Details

Date: 1893
Dimensions: 33 x 12.7
Object Type: ceramic
Material: stoneware
Catalogue number: C32
Designer and maker: R W Martin, London and Southall
Credit notes: Mackmurdo bequest, 1942

Details

Date: 1887
Dimensions: 22.8 x 19
Object Type: ceramic
Material: stoneware
Catalogue number: C31
Designer and maker: R W Martin, London and Southall
Credit notes: Mackmurdo bequest, 1942

Details

Date: 1886
Dimensions: 38.1 x 21.5
Object Type: ceramic
Material: stoneware
Catalogue number: C29a
Designer and maker: R W Martin, London and Southall
Credit notes: Mackmurdo bequest, 1942

Details

Date: 1886
Dimensions: 36.5 x 12.7
Object Type: ceramic
Material: stoneware
Catalogue number: C28a
Designer and maker: R W Martin, London and Southall
Credit notes: Mackmurdo bequest, 1942

Details

Date: 1886
Dimensions: 38.1 x 21.5
Object Type: ceramic
Material: stoneware
Catalogue number: C29
Designer and maker: R W Martin, London and Southall
Credit notes: Mackmurdo bequest, 1942

Details

Date: 1886
Dimensions: 36.5 x 12.7
Object Type: ceramic
Material: salt-glazed stoneware
Catalogue number: C28
Designer and maker: R W Martin, London and Southall
Credit notes: Mackmurdo bequest, 1942

Details

Date: 1874
Dimensions: 23.6 x 10.1
Object Type: ceramic
Material: stoneware
Catalogue number: C27
Designer: R W Martin, London and Southall
Credit notes: Mackmurdo bequest, 1942

Details

Date: 1887
Dimensions: 29.2 x 34.3
Object Type: ceramic
Material: stoneware
Catalogue number: C30
Designer: Martin, Robert Wallace (1843 - 1923)
Manufacturer: R W Martin, London and Southall
Credit notes: Mackmurdo gift, 1942

Robert Wallace Martin was one of four brothers who ran the Martin Brothers pottery in Fulham (1873-7) and Southall (1877-1915). He was part of a movement of Arts and Crafts potters who, inspired by the simplicity and rustic appearance of medieval European and Japanese stoneware (a hard, dense kind of pottery), created salt-glazed stoneware, a strong, non-porous pottery with a distinctive ‘orange-peel’ texture. Martin’s output is characterised by groteque animals, vessels with faces, and rustic sculptural forms. Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo were all avid collectors of Martinware. However, despite the Martins’s success, they never made large profits and were only able to fire the kilns once or twice a year and the brothers lived in relative poverty. So-called ‘Wally bird’ tobacco jars such as this one were extremely popular. Similar examples exist in the British Museum and V&A.

Details

Date: 1888 - 1907
Dimensions: 17.8 x 12.1
Object Type: ceramic
Material: earthenware
Catalogue number: C5
Artist: De Morgan, William (1839 - 1917)
Manufacturer: De Morgan, Sands End Pottery, Fulham, London, England
Credit notes: Mackmurdo gift, 1942

William Morris met William De Morgan in 1863, and their friendship and professional association would last until Morris’s death. There was a large degree of overlap in their design, production and sale processes. The Firm sold ceramic products of its own design and also those by De Morgan; by the 1880s De Morgan was the main supplier to the Morris shop. De Morgan also made tiles after designs by Morris. From the 1870s Morris & Co. relied on De Morgan to supply high quality coloured enamels, as commerical products contained high levels of borax which compromised the colouration and durability of the tiles. From 1882 – 1888, William De Morgan moved his premises to Merton Abbey, to be closer to Morris, who already had works there, on the banks of the River Wandle. In 1888 he moved to Sands End in Fulham, where this bottle was produced.
De Morgan regularly used motifs of animals to create densely decorated objects. Birds similar to those depicted here can be found throughout his design sketchbook, now held at the V&A Museum.

Details

Date: c. 1862-63
Dimensions: 15.2 x 15.2 each tile
Object Type: ceramic
Material: hand-painted overglaze earthenware
Catalogue number: C257
Designer: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Manufacturer: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.
Credit notes: Purchased with assistance from the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund, The Art Fund and Friends of the William Morris Gallery, 2006

Early in 1862, Edward Burne-Jones recorded in his account book (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) a series of designs for painted tiles with subjects from Greek mythology. The Judgement of Paris depicts the episode from the Greek legend when Paris, Prince of Troy has to chose the most beautiful of the three godessess and presents an apple to Venus, thus setting in train the Trojan War. The Latin inscription translates as ‘The Judgment of Paris on great Mount Ida’.

Painted in the Red Lion Square workshops of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.- of which Burne-Jones was a founder-partner with Wiliam Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown et al.- the tiles are an early and delightful example of the Pre-Raphaelite taste for depicting classical scenes in medieval guise. Paris is shown in cross-gartered leggings and huntsman’s cap, while the three godesses are distinctly late-Gothic in their bodily proportions. Identified by their named scrolls, the four figures stand in an enclosed, stylish landscape in the manner of a medieval tapestry or manuscript illumination.

Handpainted tiles were an important product of the Morris firm from its establishment in 1861 until the mid-1870s. Some were used as overmantels but others, as in this case, were intended to be framed and diplayed as pictures in their own right.

The only other known version of the tile panel is at Kelmscott Manor and differs in several details, notably that the scene is painted on 5-inch square tiles bordered with 12 blue tiles painted with an inscription by William Morris in black. It has been suggested that the Kelmscott Manor panel was to be shown at the International Exhibition at South Kensington later that year but was withdrawn from Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co’s exhibit when the ‘decorative value of verses’ was criticized by William Burges, one of the judges. If so, it is possible that this version, omitting Morris’s verses and with an integral simple inscription, was the version shown by the Firm at the Exhibition.

Object Type: ceramic

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