Florence velveteen

Details

Date: 1864
Dimensions: 101 x 60
Object Type: design
Material: black and sepia wash and pencil on paper
Catalogue number: A11
Artist: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1940

The cartoon was originally designed by Morris for a window in the vestry of St Barnabas’ church, Linslade, Bedfordshire in 1864 where it occupies the right-hand light in a three-light window. The only reference to it is in the list which Warrington Taylor made of stained glass windows executed by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. 1863-1868, a copy of which is among the Morris papers at Birmingham Art Gallery. The entry also states that Philip Webb did the canopy and pattern work in this light, but this is not recorded in Webb’s account book.
The figure also appears in the chancel south window of Bradford Cathedral (1864) – a 5-light window with tracery above and with 2 tiers of figures in the main lights, in which St Barnabas appears at the left-hand side of the lower tier. The Bradford version is thus a reversal of A11, which suggests it was done after that at Lindslade. The cartoon was also used again for windows in the following locations (listed in date order):
St Wilfrid’s Haywards Heath, Sussex in a memorial window to Emma Oldfield (d. 27 March, 1867) in the south aisle, 1868.
St Editha’s, Tamworth, Staffordshire in the lower row, right, of the east window, 1864.
Parish church, Ponsonby, Cumbria in the lower part of the right lancet of the east window, 1877.
St Denys’, Rotherfield, East Sussex in the east window, 1878.

Details

Date: 1892
Dimensions: 37.7 x 125.7
Object Type: textile
Material: silk
Technique: hand-embroidered
Catalogue number: F320
Designer: Jack, George Washington Henry (1855 - 1931)
Maker: Jack, Annie Christian (1861 - 1942)
Credit notes: Presented by Miss J Jack and Miss M Jack, 1972

This embroidery, stitched by Annie Christian Jack and designed by her husband George Jack, has a folk-art quality. The design shows the main characters from William Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. The dancing figure of Oberon (left) bears an uncanny resemblance to William Morris. Titiana and Puck are to the right. Below is the inscription “Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight”.

The panel was designed as a piano frontal and is worked in split stitch, stem stitch, herringbone, long and short stitches, cross-bar with small diagonal stitches infilled with satin stitch, single chain stitch; metal beads used for Titania’s crown and blanket Stitch.

A very similar embroidery appears also as a bolster cover at Wightwick Manor, National Trust.

Details

Date: 1877
Dimensions: 46.5 x 26.2 sheet size
Object Type: design
Material: pencil and watercolour on paper
Catalogue number: BLA465
Designer: Morris, William, 1834, 1896

‘Swivel’ was one of William Morris’ first designs intended specifically for woven fabric. This fabric was initially produced by textile contractors employed by Morris & Co., as weaving required a level of skill and equipment not yet available to the firm prior to the establishment of the Merton Abbey textile workshop, though Morris & Co. also continued to employ a number of textile contractors well into the 20th century. Nevertheless, in the late 1870s Morris set about learning to weave himself, using this knowledge to inform his designs, which made full use of the idiosyncrasies of the process. Morris then set up looms to his own specification, allowing the weavers to reproduce his intricate designs more faithfully. Initially starting with one loom and employing a single French weaver at his premises at Queen Square, Morris eventually established a workshop with four hand-operated jacquard looms, worked by master weavers from Spitalfields, who then passed on their skills to younger employees, preserving their craft for future generations. William Morris used the term ‘damask’ to define the smoother, lightweight cotton and silk fabrics in the Morris & Co. catalogue, as opposed to ‘tapestry’, which referred to the heavier, woollen fabrics.

Details

Date: c. 1890
Dimensions: 84.7 x 62.1
Object Type: design
Material: pencil and watercolour on paper
Catalogue number: BLA471
Designer: Dearle, John Henry (1859 - 1932)

This is a working cartoon for ‘Helena’, a woven textile designed by John Henry Dearle for Morris & Co. in 1890, manufactured by Alexander Morton & Co. the following year. Cartoons were full-size working drawings which specified the design to be used by the weavers, guiding them as they constructed the pattern on a loom. The paper would commonly be pinned up directly behind the loom, allowing the weaver to look through the warp threads at the image behind. The designer, John Henry Dearle, began his long association with Morris & Co. as a teenager working in the firm’s London shop. He soon became a protégé of William Morris himself, training in stained glass before becoming a tapestry assistant. Dearle eventually became, alongside May Morris, one of the firm’s most respected embroidery and tapestry designers, taking over as Art Director following Morris’ death in 1896.

Details

Date: early 1860s
Dimensions: 185.5 x 66.3
Object Type: textile
Material: wool on linen
Technique: embroidery
Catalogue number: F390ii
Designer: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Credit notes: Purchased with assistance of the MGC/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and the Friends of the William Morris Gallery, 1997

This embroidered hanging was designed by William Morris and probably hung in his first home, Red House in Bexleyheath. It was most likely stitched by a small team that may have included Morris’s wife Jane and her sister Elizabeth Burden. In the early days of their marriage Morris and Jane often worked on embroideries together. They enjoyed unpicking old pieces of embroidery that they admired to learn the different stitching techniques. Morris’s enthusiasm for medieval art is clear in his early embroidery designs, such as this one. The tree, banner and bird motif was inspired by an illustration in a fifteenth-century manuscript that he had been studying in the British Museum. The French inscription, ‘Qui Bien Aime Tard Oublie’, translates as ‘who loves best forgets slowly’ and is taken from Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem ‘Parliament of Fowls’. It simple terms it means ‘one never forgets true love’.

The embroidery was one of a set of identical hangings installed at Penkill Castle in Ayrshire, Scotland by the late 1860s. The castle belonged to Alice Boyd, mistress of the painter William Bell Scott, who was closely connected to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite circle. In a letter to Boyd in 1868, Rossetti referrers to the embroideries as “the Topsaic tapestries” a reference to Morris’s nickname ‘Topsy’. The hangings were likely an early product produced by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co after it was founded in 1861. A very similar pattern can be seen on the hanging in the background of William Morris’s only easel painting, ‘La Belle Iseult’, painted in 1858.

Details

Date: early 1860s
Dimensions: 185.5 x 127.5
Object Type: textile
Material: wool on linen
Technique: hand-embroidered
Catalogue number: F390i
Designer: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Credit notes: Purchased with assistance of the MGC/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and the Friends of the William Morris Gallery, 1997

This embroidered hanging was designed by William Morris and probably hung in his first home, Red House in Bexleyheath. It was most likely stitched by a small team that may have included Morris’s wife Jane and her sister Elizabeth Burden. In the early days of their marriage Morris and Jane often worked on embroideries together. They enjoyed unpicking old pieces of embroidery that they admired to learn the different stitching techniques. Morris’s enthusiasm for medieval art is clear in his early embroidery designs, such as this one. The tree, banner and bird motif was inspired by an illustration in a fifteenth-century manuscript that he had been studying in the British Museum. The French inscription, ‘Qui Bien Aime Tard Oublie’, translates as ‘who loves best forgets slowly’ and is taken from Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem ‘Parliament of Fowls’. In simple terms it means ‘one never forgets true love’.

Details

Date: designed 1883
Dimensions: 106 x 99.7
Object Type: textile
Material: printed cotton
Technique: block-printed
Catalogue number: F306
Designer: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Credit notes: Presented by Whitworth Art Gallery, 1969

This fragment of ‘Borage’ in green on natural ground, designed by William Morris, was given to the Whitoworth Gallery, Manchester by the firm Wardle and Co. and later transferred to the William Morris Gallery. Thomas Wardle was a master dyer who worked with Morris to perfect the dyes used for his textiles, his firm also manufactured Morris & Co. textiles before Morris moved his production in-house to Merton Abbey in 1881. This pattern was designed in 1883 and thefore post-dates Wardle & Co’s period of production for Morris & Co.

Details

Date: designed 1883
Dimensions: 22.9 x 19
Object Type: textile
Material: printed cotton
Technique: block-printed
Catalogue number: F305
Designer: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Manufacturer: Morris & Co.
Credit notes: Presented by Whitworth Art Gallery, 1969

This fragment of ‘Borage’, designed by William Morris, was given to the Whitoworth Gallery, Manchester by the firm Wardle and Co. and later transferred to the William Morris Gallery. Thomas Wardle was a master dyer who worked with Morris to perfect the dyes used for his textiles, his firm also manufactured Morris & Co. textiles before Morris moved his production in-house to Merton Abbey in 1881. This pattern was designed in 1883 and thefore post-dates Wardle & Co’s period of production for Morris & Co.

Details

Date: designed 1883
Dimensions: 22.9 x 88.3
Object Type: textile
Material: cotton
Technique: block-printed
Catalogue number: F303
Manufacturer: Morris & Co.
Designer: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Credit notes: Presented by Whitworth Art Gallery, 1969

This fragment of ‘Borage’, designed by William Morris, was given to the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester by the firm Wardle and Co. and later transferred to the William Morris Gallery. Thomas Wardle was a master dyer who worked with Morris to perfect the dyes used for his textiles, his firm also manufactured Morris & Co. textiles before Morris moved his production in-house to Merton Abbey in 1881. This pattern was designed in 1883 and thefore post-dates Wardle & Co’s period of production for Morris & Co. This example is overprinted with a number, possibly the pattern number 720/8605 and a date 19-6-24.

Details

Date: designed 1883
Dimensions: 21 x 62.2
Object Type: textile
Material: cotton
Technique: block-printed
Catalogue number: F302
Designer: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Manufacturer: Morris & Co.
Credit notes: Presented by Whitworth Art Gallery, 1969

This fragment of ‘Borage’, designed by William Morris, was one of a number of examples given to the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester by the firm Wardle and Co. and later transferred to the William Morris Gallery in 1969. Thomas Wardle was a master dyer who worked with Morris to perfect the dyes used for his textiles, his firm also manufactured Morris & Co. textiles before Morris moved his production in-house to Merton Abbey in 1881. This pattern was designed in 1883 and thefore post-dates Wardle & Co’s period of production for Morris & Co.

Details

Date: 1862
Dimensions: 218.4 x 73.7
Object Type: design
Catalogue number: A6
Artist: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Artist: Rossetti | Dante Gabriel | 1828 | 1882
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1940

First designed in 1862 for the west window of St Michael and All Angels, Brighton, Sussex. The window consits of 2 windows, each of 2 lancets, each with 6-foil above: at the left, Michael and Raphael with scene of St Michael and the Dragon, and at the right Uriel and Gabriel with scene of Annunciation above (for which see WMG A4); high in the gable above this is a rose window consisting of a central 7-foil scene of the Virgin and Child surrounded by 7 circles of music-making angels. The window was a memorial to Jane Barber (d. 15 Jan. 1860) and Thomas Barber (d. 1 Jan. 1863).

The cartoon was afterwards used for windows at Broughty Ferry, Angus, Scotland, 1914, (window in east wall of south transept of St Stephen’s) at Darwen, Lancashire, 1922 (window in south of south transept of St Cuthbert’s) note: design adapted) at Eaton Hastings, Berkshire (west window of St. Michael’s) 1935 and at Nelson, lancashire, 1919 (tracery above main chancel east window) (note: design adapted).

All four Archangels are depicted in the window at Brighton: St Gabriel (very similar inconception to St Raphael) is also by Morris, whilst SS. Michael and Uriel are the work of Ford Madox Brown.

Details

Date: 1862
Dimensions: 66.4 x 60
Object Type: design
Catalogue number: BLA472
Designer: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Designer: Webb | Philip | 1831 | 1915
Manufacturer: Morris & Co.

Trellis was the first wallpaper designed by William Morris, and the third to be printed by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. The design, which exemplifies Morris’s early interest in flat, abstracted pattern, layered to create a sense of depth, was based on rose trellises in Morris’s garden at Red House, the home designed for Morris and his wife Jane by Philip Webb. Webb worked in collaboration with Morris on this design for wallpaper, supplying the birds which add movement and interest to the composition.

Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement would have been impossible without Philip Webb, the modest, thoughtful and hardworking architect and designer whom Morris met while training as an architect in Oxford. Although primarily an architect, Webb was an avid sketcher of plant and animal life, as shown in his sketchbooks now held by the V&A. In addition to his role as a designer of furniture, metalwork and glass, Webb was also instrumental in the administration of Morris & Co., balancing the accounts and on occasion sacrificing his own wages to keep the business solvent.

Details

Date: design reg 5 October 1875, manufactured c.1875-81
Dimensions: 49.5 x 37.5
Object Type: textile
Material: cotton
Technique: block-printed
Catalogue number: F296
Attributed designer: Faulkner, Kate
Manufacturer: Wardle and Co. (1872 - 1908)
Retailer: Morris & Co.
Credit notes: Presented by Whitworth Art Gallery, 1969

This fragment of ‘Carnation’ printed cotton was in the collection of Thomas Wardle, a master dyer who manufactured Morris & Co. textiles before William Morris moved production in-house to his factory Merton Abbey, Surrey. The pattern was designed by Kate Faulkner. The partial stamp of Morris & Co., 26 Queens Square, Bloomsbury is visible on the selvedge.

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