Study of a Reclining Woman

Details

Date: c. 1860-1870
Dimensions: 11.5 x 18
Object Type: drawing
Material: pencil on paper
Catalogue number: D469
Artist: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Credit notes: Gift of Dominic Dunlop, 2018

Details

Date: c.1880s
Dimensions: 213 x 110
Object Type: textile
Material: woollen pile on cotton warp
Technique: hand-knotted
Catalogue number: N9
Designer: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Manufacturer: Morris & Co.
Credit notes: Presented by Miss M.L. Wooldridge, 1955

Hand knotted Hammersmith rug with border of pairs of birds. The border featured on a plain carpet, now in the collection of Peterhouse College, Cambridge. The pairs of birds have similarities to embroidery designs by May Morris, and Linda Parry has suggested it may point to her involvement in the Firm at that time. The original design for this border is in the V&A (E.301-1939).

This rug was given to the Gallery by Martha Wooldridge, (1863-1958) a classical dancer who purchased it around 1898 for her home, the Arts & Crafts House called ‘Wavertree’ in St Margarets, Twickenham, with whom she shared with the radical preacher Stewart Headlam (Headlam is perhaps most famous for putting up half of Oscar Wilde’s bail when he was tried for ‘gross indecency’ in 1885).

Details

Date: c.1865-68
Dimensions: 10.7 x 15.7
Object Type: print
Technique: wood engraving
Catalogue number: K790
Designer: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Maker: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1956

This is one of a series of illustrations to ‘The Story of Cupid and Psyche’ for the projected edition of ‘The Earthly Paradise’ begun in September 1865. The illustrations were engraved on wood by Morris and his friends and associates in the Firm. Burne-Jones did illustrations for some of the other tales in ‘The Earthly Paradise’, but the Cupid and Psyche wood engravings were the most completed part of the project which was abandoned in 1868 after trial pages, set in Basle and Caslon types at the Chiswick Press, did not prove satisfactory.

In 1881, a few copies of these sets of illustrations were made, apparently by Morris himself, by friction printing. A second series (numbering about 8 sets according to Sydney Cockerell) was pulled for Morris by Emery Walker at his premises at 16 Cliffords Inn during the Kelmscott Press years; all these were on Kelmscott Press paper. One of these sets, given to Cockerell by Jane Morris c.1898, is bound into a single volume (K775) owned by the William Morris Gallery. Other sets are in the Pierpont Morgan Library (Gift of John M. Crawford) and the Fitzwilliam Museum (J.R. Holliday Bequest 1927).

Drawings related to the Cupid and Psyche illustrations and other tales from ‘The Earthly Paradise’ are in the following collections: A volume of 86 preliminary drawings of various sizes executed in pencil, pen and ink or chalk, is now in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (648’27). A series of 47 finished designs in pencil on tracing paper was given by Burne-Jones to Ruskin, who presented them to Oxford University in 1875 (now in the Ashmolean). Another volume of 39 drawings formerly in the collection of F.S. Ellis is in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; 36 of these are on tracing paper, the remaining 3 on drawing paper; 21 relate to the Cupid and Psyche story though some are variants of scenes which were never engraved on wood; others are for the Story of Pygmalion and The Hill of Venus.