The Mirror of Venus

Details

Date: c.1876
Object Type: photograph
Catalogue number: PP1/Z521
Sitter: Morris, William, 1834, 1896

Photograph of William Morris wearing an artist smock and soft felt hat, c.1876. Morris had an unconventional dress sense. At university he went through a phase of only wearing purple trousers. In later years his shirts and jackets were made exclusively from indigo blue cloth. His willingness to wear a working smock in this portrait reveals a great deal about his attitude to manual labour. Unlike many reformers, Morris was a hands-on craftsman. Practical workwear such as this was as much a profession of his affinity with working people as it was a practical choice, protecting his normal clothes from the dye vats and printing ink in his factory at Merton Abbey.

Object Type: photograph

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