Fishes and Bird

Details

Date: 09.03.1876
Dimensions: 20.3 x 29.2
Object Type: design
Material: pencil on paper
Catalogue number: A394
Designer: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Retailer: Morris & Co.

Scale design drawing for a three light window for St Peter’s Church, Yateley, Hampshire. The three windows depict figures of St Peter, Christ as King and St John with additional figures of angels playing musical instruments. It is labelled ‘2nd Design for East Window, Yateley Church, March 9th 1876’, providing an insight into how Morris & Co. communicated with their clients on the final designs for artworks.

The design is also marked, ‘Omitting the angels this design is approved’. Although the windows were realised in 1878, they have since been destroyed.

Details

Dimensions: 4.4 x 9.8 x 9.8
Object Type: furniture
Material: wood
Technique: painted wood
Catalogue number: M2
Artist: Image, Selwyn, 1849, 1930
Credit notes: Mackmurdo Bequest, 1942

Small circular wooden box, lid painted with design of female head against a blue background. A band around the side of the box holds the Latin inscription: ‘O facies oculos nata tenere meos!’ This is taken from a poem in the second book of Ovid’s Amores and translates as: ‘Oh my face was born to hold my eyes!’

Details

Date: c.1875
Dimensions: 53 x 108
Object Type: textile
Catalogue number: N20
Designer: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Manufacturer: Nairns of Kirkcaldy, Scotland
Retailer: Morris & Co.
Credit notes: Transferred from the William Morris Society, 2022

This is William Morris’ only design for linoleum, and his very first foray into designing for floor coverings. The design, featuring African marigolds set against an arched trellis, was reproduced in two colourways, although only this green and yellow version is known. The floral pattern closely resembles the ‘Marigold’ design Morris produced for printed textile, which was registered at around the same time.

Linoleum, composed of linseed oil on a canvas backing, was an inexpensive and practical alternative to woven carpets for Victorian households. Morris’s linoleum was extremely popular, in part due to its low price: it cost just 3s. 10d. per square yard, less than a third of the price of the most popular machine-woven carpeting. Morris & Co. almost certainly outsourced the production to Nairns of Kirkcaldy, Scotland, who were the most prolific producers of linoleum at the end of the 19th century. Original examples are relatively rare, owing much to the everyday heavy use of the surface, however another good example, again in yellow and green, can be seen today in situ in the hallway of Emery Walker’s House and museum at 7 Hammersmith Terrace, London.

Details

Date: 1930
Dimensions: 24 x 17.8
Object Type: book
Catalogue number: K3462
Author: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Author: Bottomley, Gordon (1874 - 1948)
Publisher: The Fanfrolico Press
Credit notes: Gift from Lucia Crowden, 2022

Published in 1930 by The Fanfrolico Press, this privately printed book contains two poems by William Morris that are accompanied by eight collotype plates after drawings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Fanfrolico Press began in Sydney, Australia and later moved to London, where this book was printed and published. The two poems included, ‘The Defense of Guenevere’ and ‘King Arthur’s Tomb’ stem from Morris’s early interest in Arthurian legends and were first published by Morris in 1858.

The book is printed on handmade Barcham Green paper from Hayle Mill in Kent, it is printed in Weiss Antiqua type which was designed by the German typographer Emil Rudolf Weiss in 1928. It is the seventh book printed by The Fanfrolico Press and this copy is edition 220 of 450.

Details

Date: c. 1878
Object Type: drawing
Material: pastel on paper
Catalogue number: D189
Artist: Hughes, Arthur, 1832, 1915
Sitter: Orrinsmith, Mabel (29.10.1871 - 1880)
Sitter: Orrinsmith, Ruth (23.02.1873 - 1954)
Credit notes: Presented by Mrs Hitch, 1954

These two children were daughters of Harvey and Lucy Orrinsmith (nee Faulkner). Before her marriage, Lucy and her sister Kate Faulkner, sisters of Charles Faulkner who was a partner in the Morris firm in its early years, worked for Morris & Co. executing embroideries and decorating ceramics. Lucy also engraved at least one block for the illustrations to a proposed edition of Morris’s The Earthly Paradise. The pastel portraits were studies for an oil painting also in the Gallery’s collection (O94), painted circa 1878 when Mabel was eight and Ruth seven.

Hughes came into contact with the Pre-Raphaelites while a student at the Royal Academy Schools in the 1840s. In 1857, Hughes joined Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Morris in painting the Arthurian murals at the Oxford Union. Although invited to become a partner in Morris, Marshall. Faulkner & Co., he withdrew shortly before the enterprise was launched in 1861. Hughes’s later work retains the sentiment, if not the technique, of his early Pre-Raphaelite pictures.

Both painting and pastels were donated to the Gallery by Lucy Orrinsmith’s grandaughter, Mrs L. Hitch.

Details

Date: 06.1911
Dimensions: 14.4 x 11.5
Object Type: book
Catalogue number: K1597a
Publisher: Morris & Co. Decorators Ltd, 449 Oxford Street, London
Printer: Chiswick Press
Sitter: Campfield, George, 1861, 1898

Published by Morris & Co. in 1911 to celebrate their 50th anniversary, this book provides a history of the company and a summary of their different products. It also contains photographs of the company’s factory at Merton Abbey and an image of their showroom at 449 Oxford Street. The illustration of ‘Washing Chints in the Wandle’ (p.43) was also published in Lewis F Day’s ‘William Morris and his Art’ (Art Journal, 1899), indicating that some, or all of this series of photographs of Merton Abbey are earlier than 1911.

The illustrations include:

‘The Indigo Vat’

‘Hand Weaving Looms at Merton Abbey’

‘Printing Morris Chintzes’

‘Washing Chintz in the Wandle’

‘Arras Tapestry Looms’

‘Stained Glass Painters at Work’ – George Campfield is the figure seated with his feet on a stool. He left Morris & Co. at the end of 1898 or in 1899 so this would date the photo to the late 1890s, when he was about 70 years old.

Details

Date: early 1880s
Dimensions: 113.8 x 62.2
Object Type: design
Material: black and sepia wash and pencil on paper
Catalogue number: A481
Artist: Morris, William, 1834, 1896

This unexecuted design shows Morris’s method of creating a pattern. The free and unrestrained pencil and charcoal drawing in the background of the design is erased and refined as the pattern develops. The outlines are then strengthened in sepia watercolour before colouring is finally added.

Morris didn’t usually create preliminary sketches and instead worked out a pattern on a single sheet of paper until it either came to fruition or was abandoned, as in this example. However, the motifs and forms he created were never wasted and were reworked into future patterns, elements of his ‘Windrush’ and ‘Wandle’ patterns came be found in this earlier unexecuted design.

Details

Date: c.1860s
Dimensions: 8.1 x 17.2
Object Type: photograph
Technique: hand-coloured
Catalogue number: P738
Sitter: Lloyd | Edward | 1815 | 1890
Photographer: Mills | Thomas R.
Credit notes: Presented by Mrs Heeming, 1957

View of the back of the house with Mr Edward Lloyd, his wife and members of the family seated on the lawn. The wing of the house, shown on the left of the photograph, was subsequently demolished to make a wider entrance to the gardens and park from the front area of Lloyd Park. Note also the canopy supported on pillars over the back door leading from the hall of the house onto the back garden steps, which was also subsequently removed.

Details

Date: 1865
Dimensions: 18.2 x 13.1
Object Type: photograph
Catalogue number: P836
Sitter: Morris (née Burden) | Jane | 1839 | 1914
Photographer: Parsons, John Robert (1826 - 1909)
Artist: Rossetti | Dante Gabriel | 1828 | 1882
Credit notes: Gift of Dr Robert Steele, 1942

Jane Morris standing in the garden of Tudor House, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s home at Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Rossetti posed the photograph which was then taken by John Parsons. This photograph is a copy print (possibly by Emery Walker) of an original from an album of the Rossetti series now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Accession number 822-1942.

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