Portrait of Algernon Swinburne

Details

Date: 1865
Dimensions: 75.5 x 104.5
Object Type: design
Material: pencil and ink on paper
Catalogue number: BLA413
Artist: Webb | Philip | 1831 | 1915

Philip Webb’s design for the canopy of the East window of St John the Apostle, Torquay, Devon. The overall window was designed by Edward Burne-Jones working for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in 1865, the overall theme was of the Church Triumphant in the Heavenly Jerusalem. Webb designed the towers and turrets at the top of the five lights, this is for the central light. The chirch was designed by the architect G.E. Street who both Morris and Webb had worked for as young men. Burne-Jones designed a further West window for the church in 1890.

Details

Date: 1896
Object Type: design
Material: pen, pencil on paper
Catalogue number: A313
Designer: Morris & Co.

St. Cecilia was made by Morris & Co. in 1897 for ‘The Hill’ at Witley in Surrey, the house built for Myles Birket Foster in 1863, and where he lived until 1893 when the house was purchased by Mr. Edgar Horne, who presumably commissioned both this window and another single light, ‘Flora’ (BJ 434) which appears in the Morris & Co. ‘Catalogue of Designs for Stained Glass’ dated 8 April 1896. The entry in the Catalogue of Designs for C76 is dated 1897 January and names the glass painters as follows: figure of St. Cecilia by Walters, quarries by Wren, scroll drawn and lettered by Campfield and painted by Wren. The original Burne-Jones cartoon (BJ 50) for this figure was first used at Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge (south transept, south window, 3rd tier) in 1873; also used at St.Nicholas, Halewood, Lancashire in left light of a two-light window (south transept, memorial to Edith E. Bardswell) in 1881; and at Holy Trinity, Sloan Street, Chelsea (east window, 4th tier) in 1894-95). The finished window is in the Gallery’s collection (C76).

Details

Date: 1883
Object Type: archival
Catalogue number: J151
Designer and maker: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Credit notes: Presented by Mrs. J,W. Mackail, 1946

A sheet of notes by William Morris on his French edition of Karl Marx’s ‘Capital’. The notes comprise passages from Volume I, chapter 14, section 5: The Capitalistic Character of Manufacture.

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: 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.

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