Study for The Blessed Damozel

Details

Date: c.1873-75
Dimensions: 44 x 39
Object Type: drawing
Material: chalk on paper
Catalogue number: D186
Artist: Rossetti | Dante Gabriel | 1828 | 1882
Sitter: Wilding, Alexa (1845 - 25.04.1884)
Credit notes: Cecil French Bequest, 1954

The subject of this drawing, The Blessed Damozel, is taken from the artist Gabriel Dante Rossetti’s poem by the same title, which was first published in February 1850 in the Pre-Raphaelite magazine The Germ. The subject is a young woman who has died and waits for her lover to join her in heaven. The poem’s opening lines are: The blessed damozel looked out/From the gold bar of heaven/ Her eyes were deeper than the depth/ Of waters stilled at even.

This study was for an oil painting (now in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, USA). The painting was commissioned from Rossetti by the Scottish politician and art patron William Graham in 1871, and completed in 1877. The model was Alexa Wilding, a favourite of Rossetti who modelled for many of his paintings.

Details

Date: 1886
Object Type: drawing
Material: pencil on paper
Catalogue number: D231
Artist: Solomon, Simeon, 1840, 1905
Credit notes: Presented by Miss Martha Lugg Wooldridge, 1955

This portrait shows the head of a youth, representing Love in sleep. The portrait recalls Simeon Solomon’s mystical prose piece called Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep which he published privately in 1871. The narrative, which was of central importance to the artist’s career, was based on the platonic theme of the fulfillment of the soul through earthly love.

Details

Date: 1888
Dimensions: 22.9 x 17.5
Object Type: drawing
Material: pencil on paper
Catalogue number: D133
Artist: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Credit notes: Presented by Mrs Angela Thirkell, 1953

Burne-Jones drew the caricature on or shortly after the evening of Thursday 1 November, when Morris gave the lecture on ‘Tapestry and Carpet-Weaving’ at the first Arts & Crafts Exhibition, held at the New Gallery in Regent Street, London. The paper is watermarked 1888 and printed with the address 27 Young Street./ Kensington Sq. W. This was the Mackail’s address between 1880-1898. Mr & Mrs JW Mackail were the son-in-law and daughter of Edward Burne-Jones.

Details

Date: 02.07.1870
Dimensions: 34.1 x 50.5
Object Type: drawing
Material: pencil on paper
Catalogue number: D183
Sitter: Morris (née Burden) | Jane | 1839 | 1914
Artist: Rossetti | Dante Gabriel | 1828 | 1882

This intimate portrait of Jane Morris, William Morris’s wife, was drawn by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti was a key associate of William Morris and a founding member of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. when it was established in 1861. When he drew this work in 1870 he was involved in an intense emotional relationship with Jane Morris, which complicated his work with the Firm. In 1875 Morris restructured the Firm as Morris & Co., buying out the original partners including Rossetti.

Details

Date: 1890
Dimensions: 66 x 55.9
Object Type: drawing
Material: pastel on paper
Catalogue number: D74
Sitter: Fawcett, Philippa Garrett (4 April 1868 - 10 June 1948)
Artist: Rathbone, Harold Steward (1858 - 1929)
Credit notes: Gift of Philippa Garrett Fawcett, 1938

The subject of this portrait, Phillippa Garrett Fawcett (1868-1948) was the daughter of the pioneer suffragist Millicent Fawcett, she won early fame by achieving high marks in the Mathematics Tripos at Cambridge University- at the time women were not admitted to the University’s degrees. It is said that Fawcett inspired William Morris to use her name for one of the characters in his novel ‘News From Nowhere’. ‘Mistress Philippa’ is the skilled stone-carver whom William Guest meets during his journey up the Thames to Kelmcott.

The portrait is by Harold Steward Rathbone, after studying at the Slade School and in Paris, Rathbone worked as a pupil of Ford Madox Brown, assisting him with the murals at Manchester Town Hall. He played an active role in the Arts and Crafts Movement and in 1893 set up the Della Robbia Art Pottery in Birkenhead.

Details

Date: unknown date
Dimensions: 76.2 x 62.3
Object Type: drawing
Material: pencil, sepia and watercolour on paper
Catalogue number: D237
Attributed artist: Ruskin, John, 1819, 1900
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1961

This work has been attributed to the artist, critic and thinker John Ruskin, although it is unsigned. Ruskin first saw Rouen in 1835 and wrote of the west porch of the cathedral in his book The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) as ‘the most exquisite piece of pure flamboyant work existing‘. Morris was also impressed by this building, writing ‘no words can tell you how its mingled beauty, history and romance took hold of me’.

Details

Date: c.1857
Dimensions: 13.8 x 12.1
Object Type: drawing
Material: pen, pencil on paper
Catalogue number: D222
Artist: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1954

Edward Burne-Jones had no formal art training and the rather awkward perspective and drawing of the figure in this work suggests it was drawn at an early date. The cross-hatching for the modelling figure, shadows and shading suggests the drawing was made for an illustration, possibly Cupid’s daughter by his forge from Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem The Parlement of Fowles:

Under a tree, besyde a welle, I say

Cupyde our lord his arwes forge and fyle;

And at his fete his bowe al redy lay,

And wel his doghter tempred al this whyle

The hedes in the welle, and with hir wyle

She couched hem after as they shulde serve,

Some for to slee, and some to wounde and kerve

This drawing was possibly reused in Burne-Jones watercolour ‘Cupid’s Forge’ (1861) now in a Private Collection.

Previous attempts to identify the drawing by Waters & Harrison suggested that the subject shown is ‘an Arthurian incident, possibly the Lady of Shalott’. However, there is no loom, no mirror, no river and the figure of the man beyond the open window, though singing, hardly resembles ‘the bold Sir Lancelot’ of Tennyson’s poem ‘The Lady of Shalott’. A later alternative suggested it was from ‘King Grisly-Beard’ in Grimm’s ‘Fairy Tales’, a source of inspiration for other works by Morris and Burne-Jones at this early date. This story tells of a king’s daughter who spurns so many suitors that her father makes her marry the first beggar who comes to the palace. He turns out to be a strolling musician (King Grisly-Beard, one of the rejected suitors in disguise) who takes her to live in a cottage in a forest where she is made to cook and do other menial tasks.

Details

Date: 1861
Dimensions: 51 x 41
Object Type: drawing
Material: pencil and ink on paper
Catalogue number: D223
Artist: Morris, William (1834 - 1896)
Sitter: Morris (née Burden) | Jane | 1839 | 1914
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1955

Originally thought to depict Iseult boarding a ship from the classic chivalric romance ‘Tristan and Iseult’, this portrait of Jane Morris in medieval costume is instead most likely to be a depiction of her as Helen of Troy. Morris chose the subject of ‘Tristan and Iseult’ for the mural he painted in the Oxford Union library building from 1857-1859, he created various sketches for the scene over the summer of 1857 and began work on his only easel painting on a similar theme, ‘La Belle Iseult’, now in the Tate collection.

However, this drawing’s paper is watermarked with the date of 1861 which places it after the Oxford Union murals were completed. Instead it is more likely to be a study for a mural planned for the staircase at Red House depicting the Trojan War. In the drawing Jane is climbing a small ladder to enter a ship, a likely reference to Helen of Troy whose great beauty, according to legend, triggered the Trojan War.

Morris’s interest in pattern design is already evident in the elaborate sleeve lining shown in this piece. Jane was a talented needlewoman and may well have made this costume herself.

Details

Date: c.1888
Dimensions: 19 x 14.5
Object Type: drawing
Catalogue number: D75
Artist: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Credit notes: Presented by John William Mackail, 1930

This original drawing was used for the etched frontispiece to the 1888 edition of Morris’s ‘A Dream of John Ball’ published by Reeves and Turner (see K518a). Morris’s work had previously been published in serial form in ‘The Commonweal’ in 1887. The same design, this time a woodcut, was used with a border and capital lettering for the frontispiece of the Kelmscott Press edition of ‘A Dream of John Ball’ printed 1892, and for a leaflet for the Ancloats Brotherhood, printed by the Press in 1894 (see K25). The illustration was again reproduced in the ‘Daily Chronicle’ in 1895 as part of a collection of 24 illustrations by nearly all the well-known artists of the day, assembled by Joseph Pennell with the object of furthering the cause of the Reform Party at the L.C.C. elections. The title on this occasion was ‘Labour’ set in modern typeface and it was purported that the illustration had been specially drawn for the ‘Daily Chronicle’.

Details

Date: c.1895-7
Dimensions: 25 x 17.5
Object Type: drawing
Catalogue number: D192
Artist: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1954

This pencil drawing by Edward Burne-Jones was a preliminary drawing for an illustration in William Morris’s Kelmscott Press edition of Sigurd the Volsung published in January 1898. The Kelmscott Press edition of Sigurd was first proposed in November 1891. At the time Burne-Jones was already working on the illustrations for the Kelmcott Press edition of The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, but agreed to provide 25 illustrations to the Sigurd. He found the subject much less congenial than working on Chaucer and his illustrations progressed slowly. Morris’s death in October 1896 put an end to the idea of a fully illustrated folio and in the final edition as printed, only two illustrations were used, ‘The Dwelling of Volsung’ (frontispiece) and ‘Gudrun Setting Fire to the Palace of Atli’. Another drawing, similar to this one, is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Details

Object Type: drawing
Material: pencil, ink and watercolour on paper
Catalogue number: W147n
Artist: Pugh, Elinor M., Miss, 1962
Credit notes: Elinor Pugh bequest, 1963

Elinor Pugh illustrated a number of books, mostly for children, including a picture book of scenes from London. This one, titled “At the Zoo” shows a pair of elegantly dressed children aboard a magnificent camel. Like many of her illustrations, this simple ink drawing nevertheless gives every subject a distinct character: the watchful zookeeper in his London Zoee uniform; the small child nervously holding the reins of his decidedly superior-looking steed. Pugh made several copies of these illustrations before completing a more finished version for publication, allowing her to perfect the composition.

Details

Date: c.1907
Object Type: drawing
Material: pen and ink on paper
Catalogue number: K881a
Artist: Pugh, Elinor M., Miss, 1962
Credit notes: Miss Elinor Pugh bequest, 1963

This charming illustration is one of a series of pen and ink illustrations that accompanied “100 Poésies Enfantines” or “100 Poems for Children” by Daniel Jones, a notable early phonetician. The book contained poems, maxims and proverbs written in French phonetics, a way of spelling developed in the 19th Century designed to help young children to learn speech sounds. Pugh’s signature pen and ink is here simplified to a linear style. The mouse’s smart jacket is reminiscent of an Edwardian soldier’s uniform, a nod to her interest in costume design.

Details

Date: c.1896
Dimensions: 10.1 x 15.9
Object Type: drawing
Catalogue number: D280
Artist: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Designer: Catterson-Smith, Robert (1853 - 1938)
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1962

One of three drawings in the same series. For two others see D280a and D280b. They were designed by Burne-Jones as illustrations for a prose version of The Hill of Venus which Morris had intended to write and publish in a Kelmscott Press edition.
The tale had already been written in verse form by Morris in The Earthly Paradise, and when Morris was planning to produce a fine printing of this work in the 1860s, Burne-Jones designed a number of illustrations for this story which were never used as the projected edition was abandoned. However, when Morris began his prose version of this tale in 1896, these original designs were taken up and developed by Burne-Jones for the Kelmscott press edition. The story remained unfinished at Morris’s death and hence the book never appeared. The borders which Morris had designed for the Kelmscott Press edition were later used in the small folio of the Story of Sigurd the Volsung published by the Press in 1898 (for a copy see K694). Burne-Jones’s illustrations were thus never printed, though some of them had been prepared for engraving by Robert Cattermole-Smith, using the same techniques as for the Chaucer illustrations. For three such prepared designs see D281, a and b.

Details

Date: c.1896
Dimensions: 10.1 x 15.9
Object Type: drawing
Catalogue number: D280b
Artist: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Designer: Catterson-Smith, Robert (1853 - 1938)
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1962

One of three drawings in the same series. For two others see D280 and D280a. They were designed by Burne-Jones as illustrations for a prose version of The Hill of Venus which Morris had intended to write and publish in a Kelmscott Press edition.
The tale had already been written in verse form by Morris in The Earthly Paradise, and when Morris was planning to produce a fine printing of this work in the 1860s, Burne-Jones designed a number of illustrations for this story which were never used as the projected edition was abandoned. However, when Morris began his prose version of this tale in 1896, these original designs were taken up and developed by Burne-Jones for the Kelmscott press edition. The story remained unfinished at Morris’s death and hence the book never appeared. The borders which Morris had designed for the Kelmscott Press edition were later used in the small folio of the Story of Sigurd the Volsung published by the Press in 1898 (for a copy see K694). Burne-Jones’s illustrations were thus never printed, though some of them had been prepared for engraving by Robert Cattermole-Smith, using the same techniques as for the Chaucer illustrations. For three such prepared designs see D281, a and b.

Details

Date: c.1896
Dimensions: 10.1 x 15.9
Object Type: drawing
Catalogue number: D280a
Artist: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Designer: Catterson-Smith, Robert (1853 - 1938)
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1962

One of three drawings in the same series. For two others see D280 and D280b. They were designed by Burne-Jones as illustrations for a prose version of The Hill of Venus which Morris had intended to write and publish in a Kelmscott Press edition.
The tale had already been written in verse form by Morris in The Earthly Paradise, and when Morris was planning to produce a fine printing of this work in the 1860s, Burne-Jones designed a number of illustrations for this story which were never used as the projected edition was abandoned. However, when Morris began his prose version of this tale in 1896, these original designs were taken up and developed by Burne-Jones for the Kelmscott press edition. The story remained unfinished at Morris’s death and hence the book never appeared. The borders which Morris had designed for the Kelmscott Press edition were later used in the small folio of the Story of Sigurd the Volsung published by the Press in 1898 (for a copy see K694). Burne-Jones’s illustrations were thus never printed, though some of them had been prepared for engraving by Robert Cattermole-Smith, using the same techniques as for the Chaucer illustrations. For three such prepared designs see D281, a and b.

Details

Date: c.1896
Dimensions: 6.8X10 cm
Object Type: drawing
Catalogue number: D281b
Artist: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Designer: Catterson-Smith, Robert (1853 - 1938)
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1962

Details

Date: c.1896
Dimensions: 6.1 x 9.4 cm
Object Type: drawing
Catalogue number: D281
Artist: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Designer: Catterson-Smith, Robert (1853 - 1938)
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1962

One of three prints in the same series. For two others see D281a and D281b. They were designed by Burne-Jones as illustrations for a prose version of The Hill of Venus which Morris had intended to write and publish in a Kelmscott Press edition.
The tale had already been written in verse form by Morris in The Earthly Paradise, and when Morris was planning to produce a fine printing of this work in the 1860s, Burne-Jones designed a number of illustrations for this story which were never used as the projected edition was abandoned. However, when Morris began his prose version of this tale in 1896, these original designs were taken up and developed by Burne-Jones for the Kelmscott press edition. The story remained unfinished at Morris’s death and hence the book never appeared. The borders which Morris had designed for the Kelmscott Press edition were later used in the small folio of the Story of Sigurd the Volsung published by the Press in 1898 (for a copy see K694). Burne-Jones’s illustrations were thus never printed, though some of them had been prepared for engraving by Robert Cattermole-Smith, using the same techniques as for the Chaucer illustrations. For three such prepared designs see D281, a and b.

Details

Date: c.1880
Object Type: drawing
Catalogue number: BrD77
Artist: Shields, Frederic James (1833 - 1911)
Credit notes: Brangwyn gift, 1948

Shields was commissioned to decorate the interior of The Chapel of the Ascension, Bayswater by its benefactress, Emilia Russell Gurney. Shields first met Gurney in 1882, and later she sent both Shields and architect Herbert Horne to the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore della Pietrasanta in Naples for inspiration. After the building’s exterior was completed by Horne in 1894, Shields began work on his series of murals and panels depicting imagery from both the Old and New Testaments, including this design for St Jude (see also a watercolour of Malachi from the same scheme, also in WMG’s collection: BrW74). Sheilds discusses the paintings in his pamphlet Chapel of the Ascension: Its Story and Scheme (twelve editions published by the Women’s Printing Society between 1897 and 1935). The work was finally completed in 1910; however, the Chapel and its decorative scheme were destroyed during the Blitz in 1944.

Object Type: drawing

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