Tea Plate

Details

Date: c.1904
Dimensions: 37 length
Object Type: metalwork
Material: gold, garnets, sapphires and seed pearls
Catalogue number: L18
Designer and maker: Morris | May | 1862 | 1938
Credit notes: Presented by Miss Lyndon Lang, 1954

This short necklace was made by May Morris. Four gemstones (two saphires, pyrope garnet (front), almandine garnet (clasp) and seed pearls) are set in closed-back settings over heavily tinted foils to enhance their colour. May would have set the gemstones herself, probably using a gas torch and hand tools. She is unlikely to have made the gold belcher chain. The necklace was given to Marie Lyndon-Lang on her 21st birthday in 1904. Her father, the ophthalmic surgeon, befriended William Morris in his youth and was an enthusiastic customer of the Kelsmcott Press.

Details

Date: c.1873-75
Dimensions: 44 x 39
Object Type: drawing
Material: chalk on paper
Catalogue number: D186
Artist: Rossetti | Dante Gabriel | 1828 | 1882
Sitter: Wilding, Alexa (1845 - 25.04.1884)
Credit notes: Cecil French Bequest, 1954

The subject of this drawing, The Blessed Damozel, is taken from the artist Gabriel Dante Rossetti’s poem by the same title, which was first published in February 1850 in the Pre-Raphaelite magazine The Germ. The subject is a young woman who has died and waits for her lover to join her in heaven. The poem’s opening lines are: The blessed damozel looked out/From the gold bar of heaven/ Her eyes were deeper than the depth/ Of waters stilled at even.

This study was for an oil painting (now in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, USA). The painting was commissioned from Rossetti by the Scottish politician and art patron William Graham in 1871, and completed in 1877. The model was Alexa Wilding, a favourite of Rossetti who modelled for many of his paintings.

Details

Date: design registered 2 September 1883
Dimensions: 77.5 x 91.4 (per curtain)
Object Type: textile
Material: cotton
Technique: indigo discharge and block-printed
Catalogue number: F325b
Designer: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Manufacturer: Morris & Co.
Credit notes: Purchased with a grant in aid from the V&A, 1978

Details

Date: design registered 2 September 1883
Dimensions: 77.5 x 91.4 (per curtain)
Object Type: textile
Material: cotton
Technique: indigo discharge and block-printed
Catalogue number: F325a
Designer: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Manufacturer: Morris & Co.
Credit notes: Purchased with a grant in aid from the V&A, 1978

This design was named after a tributary of the River Thames. The design was based on a piece of seventeenth century Italian cut velvet and purchased in 1883 for the historic textiles collection of the South Kensington Museum, for whom Morris acted as an adviser for collection purchases. This is one of a pair of curtains originally from Miss Frances J. Lefroy, whose parents’ house was decorated by Morris & Co. in the 1890s;

Details

Date: designed 1883
Dimensions: 160.3 x 53.7
Object Type: wallpaper
Technique: block-printed
Catalogue number: B52a
Designer: Morris | May | 1862 | 1938
Manufacturer: Jeffrey & Co.
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1955

During her first three years working for Morris & Co, May Morris designed three wallpapers. ‘Honeysuckle’ was her most popular and enduring pattern and its light and uplifting design proved very successful for the firm. The design is based on a net structure of untamed woody stems, small curling leaves in two tones and honeysuckle flowers set against a plain background and was printed in four colourways. The repeat is 54cm.

Until recently questions surround who originally designed ‘Honeysuckle’, with some arguing that May’s father, William Morris was in fact the chief designer of the wallpaper. This is based on its earliest known attribution from 1890 by the writer of an article in The Woman’s World where it was credited to William Morris. However it was not unusual at this time for the designs of both May and Henry Dearle, Morris & Co.’s chief designer, to be credited to the firm’s more famous owner: the association tended to make the products more commercially viable. The first time the design is attributed to May appeared twenty years after The Womans World article in the Morris & Co. wallpaper catalogue from about 1909 and is confirmed in a letter by May.

Details

Date: Designed 1879, manufactured early 20th century
Dimensions: 40 x 43.5
Object Type: textile
Technique: power-loom jacquard woven
Catalogue number: F157
Designer: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Retailer: Morris & Co.
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1955

William Morris designed Flower Garden in 1879. He described it in a letter to a Georgiana Burne-Jones on 4 March 1879: ‘I am…in a whirlwind of dyeing and weaving, and…rather excited by a new piece…which looks beautiful, like a flower garden’. Morris claims to have chosen the colours to ‘suggest the beauties of inlaid metal’. They were almost certainly influenced by a display of items from Damascus he had studied in the dealer Vincent J. Robinson’s shop in London in March 1878 (see letter from WM to May Morris). The irregular shape of this fragment suggests it was used to upholster an armchair or sofa, it was purchased by the Gallery in 1940 from the Estate of Mrs Lucius Gubbins, one of Morris & Co.’s most well known customers.

Details

Date: 1879
Dimensions: 52 x 45.5
Object Type: textile
Catalogue number: F131b
Designer: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Credit notes: Presented by the County Technical School, Chiselhurst, 1956

Dove and Rose was produced in silk and wool double cloth. The design is formed of leaves, stems, rose sprays, acorns and doves in green and red. According to Morris, writing in a letter to Rosalind Howard, the structure of double cloth made it suitable only for curtains and hangings rather than upholstery. This piece was part of the original Morris & Co. furnishings at Bullerswood, and formed part of the curtaining of the drawing room. Morris & Co. were commissioned to decorate the interior of Bullerswood, a large house in Chislehurst, Kent- leased by John Sanderson, the owner of a large wool exporting company

The cloth was first woven by outworkers at Alexander Morton & Co. Later, at Merton Abbey, Morris & Co.’s textile workshop, Morris installed hand-operated jacquard looms, which partly automated the weaving process. Large orders were sub-contracted to companies that used steam-powered looms. Morris welcomed technological progress that genuinely saved repetitive labour without compromising the quality of the final product. He believed that “it is the allowing of machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays”.

To weave the ‘Dove and Rose’ textile, Morris’s original design was painted on point-paper (see original design in WMG: BLA451). This was used to make a series of punch cards, which were fed into the loom and controlled the production of the pattern. Morris felt uneasy about subjecting his employees to the “deafening clatter” of the weaving shed, but accepted it as a necessary evil to produce fine fabrics in silk and wool. According to Morris, writing in a letter to Rosalind Howard, the structure of this fabric made it suitable only for curtains and hangings rather than upholstery.

Details

Date: 1879
Dimensions: 66 x 34.5
Object Type: textile
Catalogue number: F131a
Credit notes: Gift of Lady Pooley, 1953

Details

Dimensions: 57.8 x 87.6
Object Type: textile
Technique: hand-loom jacquard woven
Catalogue number: F198
Designer: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Manufacturer: Morris & Co.
Credit notes: Presented by Miss E. Pugh, 1961

Details

Dimensions: 95.3 x 68.5 x 78.7
Object Type: furniture
Material: turned ebonised wood
Catalogue number: G38
Designer: Webb | Philip | 1831 | 1915
Manufacturer: Morris & Co.
Credit notes: Presented by J. and N. Larkin, 1967

The design of the chair was developed by Philip Webb, c.1866, although Warrington Taylor, the Firm’s business manager from 1865, seems to have been responsible for spotting the original prototype which formed the basis of Webb’s design. A note from Warrington Taylor to Webb contains a sketch of a smilar chair, annotated “back and seat made with bars across to put cushions on, moving on a hinge, a chair model of which I saw with an old carpenter at Herstmonceaux, Sussex, by name Ephraim Colman, your truly W. T.” It has always been supposed that the chair referred to above was an original piece of rural Sussex furniture; however a chair of a very similar design is illustrated in an early 19th century catalogue. Whatever the origins, the chair as designed by Webb for Morris went into production in the mid-1860s and became one of the Firm’s most popular items, still appearing in Morris & Co. catalogues as late as the first decade of this century. According to a letter in the Gallery files from the donor, Mrs Joan Larkin, (4th September, 1967) this chair (G38) originally belonged to the Morrises, and was presented to Dr Robert Steele by May Morris, daughter of William Morris. Robert Steele was May Morris’s executor, and after his death it passed to his family and finally to his grand-daughters, the Misses J and N Larkin, who presented it in 1967. A handwritten green tag, signed by Miss Larkin describes the armchair as “used by William Morris up to time of his death and for a great many years before..” and described in a letter by Joan Larken thus: “..it was a favourite armchair for W.M., he used to read over his writings and proofs therein as recalled by my grandfather,…Miss May Morris passed it on to him…” The chair was damaged in the Blitz (during the Second World War).
Originally the chair was upholstered in Morris ‘Utrecht’ velvet in green for the deep-buttoned back and seat cushions and arm pads; however it was re-upholstered in 1979-80 by the Gallery in Liberty’s reproduction Moris ‘Daffodil’ chintz in dark blue.

Details

Date: c.1911-1912
Dimensions: 61 x 61
Object Type: watercolour
Catalogue number: W211
Artist: Robinson, Frederick Cayley (1862 - 1927)
Credit notes: Cecil French Bequest, 1954

A related tempera sketch, The Landing of St. Patrick in Ireland, (22.7 x 22.2 cm) is in Carlisle City Art Gallery collection No. 20 (Gordon Bottomley Bequest, reproduced Waters & Harrison, Burne Jones, 1973, p.181 fig.270). Both this and W211 are apparently studies for a decorative mural for which, following a competition in 1912, Cayley Robinson was awarded a commission by Sir Hugh Lane. The mural was intended to decorate a proposed Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin.

Details

Date: designed 1878
Dimensions: 163 x 137.2
Object Type: textile
Material: woven wool
Technique: hand-loom jacquard woven
Catalogue number: F26cii
Designer: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Retailer: Morris & Co. Art-Workers Ltd., 17 George Street, Hanover Square, London
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1940

‘Peacock and Dragon’ was designed by William Morris in 1878. It was first hand-woven on jacquard looms at Morris & Co’s premises in Queen Square, London and later at the firm’s factory Merton Abbey, Surrey. It was available in two widths: 183 cm (72 in.) and also in 137 cm (54 in). It was available in two colourways, Morris & Co. pattern no: 200 (5 colourways) and 5623 (2 colourways). The size of pattern repeat: 109 x 90 cm. (43 x 35.5 in.).

This example is one width of a double width pair of curtains made by the Gallery for display in the 1960s, the four widths were separated around 1988 to form four lengths (see F26). The curtains were made from an original 30 yard length of 54 inch width five colourway fabric, acquired from Morris & Co. when it closed in 1940.

Details

Date: 1929
Dimensions: 26 x 18.5 x 1 cm
Object Type: book
Catalogue number: K936
Author: Image, Selwyn, 1849, 1930
Publisher: Sanders Philips & Co, The Baynard Press
Credit notes: Gift of Eleanor Pugh, 1963

Small 4to, quarter cloth with blue paper boards, inscription ‘A.H. Mackmurdo from S.I. Decr 15. 1929.’ on free front endpaper, hand numbered ‘4’, 22 collotype illustration plates.

Details

Date: 1932
Dimensions: 23 x 15 x 2
Object Type: book
Catalogue number: K884
Author: Image, Selwyn, 1849, 1930
Editor: Mackmurdo | Arthur Heygate | 1851 | 1942
Photographer: Walker | Emery | 1851 | 1933

8vo, quarter blue buckram boards with gilt title on spine, in dust jacket, torn, soiled, missing spine, inscription in ink on free front endpaper ‘To my niece Elinor Pugh From the Editor A.H. Mackmurdo 30.7.32’, limited edition of 560 copies, photogravure frontispiece portrait of Selwyn Image by Russell & Sons, engraved by Emery Walker, reproduction of Image letter to Mackmurdo tipped in after p. 12.

Details

Date: c.1867
Dimensions: 15 x 15
Object Type: ceramic
Material: earthenware
Technique: hand-painted
Catalogue number: C231
Designer: Holiday, Henry, 1839, 1927
Credit notes: Private donation, 2000

One of a series of six painted tiles by Henry Holiday illustrating Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’. This scene accompanies the part of the story “She longs to become a mortal, and obtains from a witch a potion which will effect the change”. The decoration is painted in over glaze enamels on glazed blank tile by Minton, Hollins & Co. The original designs for these tiles are at Standen (National Trust), four tiles (inclusing this design) are also in the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford.

Details

Date: c.1867
Dimensions: 7.6 x 9.6
Object Type: ceramic
Material: earthenware
Technique: hand-painted
Catalogue number: C223
Maker: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.
Designer: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Credit notes: Presented by Richard and Hilary Myers, 1997

This design of alternating swans and leaf scroll motif is attributed to William Morris c.1862. The tiles were decorated in Morris & Co.’s workshops on an imported Dutch tin-glaze tile. Morris later transferred production to the Netherlands, those tiles are slightly larger and decorated using the more durable ‘in-glaze’ technique (see C191), as opposed to the hand painted ‘on-glaze’ technique of this earlier smaller tile. This example was from ‘The Orchard’ in Claygate, nr. Esher, the Surrey home of the writer’s William and Mary Howitt.

Details

Date: 03.02.1889
Dimensions: 16.5 x 10.5
Object Type: photograph
Material: photograph
Catalogue number: P652
Sitter: Morris | May | 1862 | 1938
Credit notes: Presented by Miss Dorothy Walker, 1955

This striking photograph of May Morris was taken on 3 February 1889 at Hammersmith Terrace, London. Standing with her guitar by a Morris & Co. Sussex chair, May was likely rehearsing for a Socialist League performance.

The photograph is one of a series taken that day, including one of her seated (see WMG:P660) as well as group photograph (held at The Wilson, Cheltenham) capturing May alongside Henry Halliday Sparling, Emery Walker, and George Bernard Shaw—all active members of the Socialist League. From 1885, May took part in Socialist plays and entertainments, often performing with Eleanor Marx and Shaw. She also ran a choir and remained a keen guitarist throughout her life.

May understood that music, theatre, and social gatherings were powerful tools for bringing people into the Socialist movement. She later wrote two plays: Lady Griselda’s Dream (1898) and White Lies (1903).

Details

Date: 03.02.1889
Dimensions: 16 x 11
Object Type: photograph
Material: photograph
Catalogue number: P660
Sitter: Morris | May | 1862 | 1938
Credit notes: Presented by Mrs Charles Bramley from her husband's collection, 1962

This striking photograph of May Morris was taken on 3 February 1889 at Hammersmith Terrace, London. Seated with her guitar in front of a curtain made from Morris & Co. fabric, May was likely rehearsing for a Socialist League performance.

The photograph is one of a series taken that day, including one of her standing (see WMG:P652) as well as group photograph (held at The Wilson, Cheltenham) capturing May alongside Henry Halliday Sparling, Emery Walker, and George Bernard Shaw—all active members of the Socialist League. From 1885, May took part in Socialist plays and entertainments, often performing with Eleanor Marx and Shaw. She also ran a choir and remained a keen guitarist throughout her life.

Details

Date: c.1885
Dimensions: 25 x 12.5
Object Type: textile
Material: silk on cotton
Catalogue number: F454
Maker: Burden, Elizabeth (13.12.1841 - 22.08.1924)
Credit notes: The widow of Tim Langley, purchased with assistance from the Friends of the William Morris Gallery and the Art Fund, 2018

This embroidery is a part of a chalice cover or pall- used to cover the chalice cup for holy communion. It is stitched by Elizabeth (Bessie) Burden, the sister-in-law of William Morris. The figurative design of a young winged angel minstrel, clothed in medieval style dress holding two clashing cymbals is based on Morris’s c.1867 design for stained glass. A design drawing for a chalice cover from from the same series, depicting an angel with a harp, is in the William Morris Society collection (D213)

Burden’s innovative application of Morris’s design appears to have been inspired by medieval embroidery. The figure is embroidered in silk, using the eponymous ‘Burden Stitch’, applied here to great effect, particularly in the fine features of the angel’s face. The background is intricately embroidered with couched gold thread to create a three dimensional pattern of flowers. At some point in the embroidery’s history it has been framed and Burden’s signature affixed below.

Burden, along with her sister Jane, Morris’s wife, was to play a central role in the production of many of Morris’s finest embroideries. She helped stitch the medieval inspired hangings that furnished William and Jane’s first home, Red House and would later play a central role in his firm’s embroidery department. Although Morris and Burden had a fractious personal relationship, Morris described her as ‘a First-rate needle-woman’ with a ‘complete mastery of the theory & practice of all kinds of needlework’.

In addition to working for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., Burden supplemented her income by teaching embroidery at the home she shared with her sister and brother-in-law at 26 Queen Square in Bloomsbury and later became an instructor at the Royal School of Needlework (RSN). Whilst at the School she popularised a type of tapestry stitch that could be used to great effect for embroidery figures, as exemplified in this embroidery. The stitch was renamed ‘Burden Stitch’ in the School’s Handbook of Embroidery in recognition of Bessie’s contribution; a woodcut showing the stitch was also included in the volume on the grounds that the RSN was frequently asked to describe it.

Most interestingly, it bears a striking resemblance to c.1890s embroidery ‘Minstrel with Cymbals’ by Morris’s daughter May, now in the collection of the William Morris Society. Although there are noticeable differences- Burden’s Angel is winged and set against a gold couched background, whereas May’s figure is without wings and the background is of an orange tree, the similarities, from the folds in the Angel’s clothes, to the details in the hands, makes it possible that this example by Burden, the older and more experienced embroider, inspired her niece May to create her own later version of the design.

Details

Date: designed c.1898
Object Type: textile
Material: woven wool
Technique: hand-loom jacquard woven
Catalogue number: F460
Designer: Dearle, John Henry (1859 - 1932)
Manufacturer: Morris & Co.

This woven wool was designed by John Henry Dearle for Morris & Co. around 1898. The repeating pattern is formed of orange coloured squirrels amongst a grape vine heavy with fruit. Originally entitled Fox and Grape after the Aesop fable, it was later changed to Squirrel, presumably because the animals more closely resembled the form of a red squirrel. Although many of Morris & Co’s patterns feature birds, beside the rabbits in the popular ‘Brother Rabbit’ pattern and these squirrels, there are no other examples of animals in the Firm’s repeating textile patterns. This example was once one of a pair of curtains and features two widths of decorative fringing at the bottom. The wool was produced on a jaquard hand-loom at Morris & Co’s factory Merton Abbey and came in three colourways. Dearle’s original design drawing is in the Huntington Art Collection, USA.

Details

Date: 1864-66
Dimensions: 66 x 48.3
Object Type: design
Catalogue number: A21
Artist: Morris, William, 1834, 1896
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1940

This designs of two angels was probably made in 1864 specifically for the west window of St Oswald’s, Durham (a three-light window with tracery) in which the main lights showing six scenes from the life of St Oswald were designed by Ford Madox Brown. The quarry panels below have shields bearing the arms of Elliott, Fogg and Fogg-Elliott by Philip Webb, while Morris was responsible for designing the half-length angels in circlets set in quarry panels between the upper and lower scenes in the main lights and for the angels in the tracery above. The angels, for which A21 is the design, appear in the second tier of tracery in two panel lights.
The same cartoon was used for windows in: Bradford Cathedral, 1864, Bloxham, 1869, Christ Church, Oxford, 1871, Knaresborough, 1873, Over Stowey, 1873, West Wratting, 1910, Wirksworth, 1909, and Wormington, 1912.

Details

Date: 1896 - 1901
Dimensions: 45 x 29
Object Type: drawing
Material: pencil on paper
Catalogue number: D279
Artist: Sloane, Mary Annie (10.12.1867 - 30.11.1961)
Credit notes: Mary Annie Sloane bequest, 1962

Mary Annie Sloane’s pencil drawing depicts a professional embroidery studio at the turn of the Twentieth century. Nine women are seated around a table with a woman seated on her own. The workers wear white pinafores and cuffs to keep their work clean.

The location of the workshop is unknown, however it is is annotated with the names of the workers: Miss Wells, Miss Cook, Mrs Forsythe, Mrs Lindus, Head, Underwood, Appleby, Knight, Lynes, Buckingham. Sloane’s address at Montague Mansions, Crawford Street, London is written on the reverse, where she lived from 1896-1901. The artist was a close friend of May Morris, and a member and Honorary Secretary of the Women’s Guild of Arts that May Morris founded in 1907. The pair travelled to Florence and Majorca, and Sloane drew several pencil portraits of may, now in the WMG collection. Sloane took over the lease of May’s house at 8 Hammersmith Terrace in London, after she moved permanently to Kelmscott Manor.

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