The Praise, plate for frontispiece of the Hobby Horse

Details

Date: 1884
Object Type: print
Material: paper
Catalogue number: P514
Publisher: Century Guild
Artist: Horne, Herbert Percy, 1864, 1916
Credit notes: Presented by Miss Elinor Pugh, 1961

This print was used as a frontispiece of the Hobby Horse, Edition 1, April 1884. It illustrates the epic poem The Praise by members of the Century Guild, an English group of art enthusiasts that were most active between 1883 and 1888.

Details

Date: c.1862
Dimensions: 12.7 x 12.7
Object Type: ceramic
Material: earthenware
Catalogue number: C175a
Designer: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Artist: Orrinsmith (née Faulkner) | Lucy
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1970

This tile, designed by Edward Burne-Jones and painted by Lucy Faulkner, shows Alceste, a character found in Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Goode Wimmen’. Tiles were a popular and financially important aspect of Morris and Co.’s early output and were often influenced by medieval and Renaissance sources. Despite Morris’s belief that works of art should, as far as possible, be designed and executed by a single craftsperson, the tiles created by Morris & Co. were part of a more complex chain of production: blank tiles were purchased from the Netherlands and were then painted by members of Morris’s workshop (including regularly by sisters Lucy and Kate Faulkner) to designs by Morris, Burne-Jones and others.

This depiction of Alceste is one of a series of designs based on ‘Legend of Goode Wimmen’ and is typical of Burne-Jones’s use of combining ceramic tiles in the creation of pictorial decoration.

Details

Dimensions: 8.2 x 22.8
Object Type: ceramic
Material: stoneware
Catalogue number: C174
Maker: Martin, Robert Wallace (1843 - 1923)
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1968

Robert Wallace Martin was one of four brothers who ran the Martin Brothers pottery in Fulham (1873-7) and Southall (1877-1915). He was part of a movement of Arts and Crafts potters who, inspired by the simplicity and rustic appearance of medieval European and Japanese stoneware (a hard, dense kind of pottery), created salt-glazed stoneware, a strong, non-porous pottery with a distinctive ‘orange-peel’ texture. Martin’s output is characterised by groteque animals, vessels with faces, and rustic sculptural forms. Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo were all avid collectors of Martinware.

Details

Date: c. 1885 - 1900
Dimensions: 127 x 43.3 x 43.3
Object Type: furniture
Material: beechwood and leather
Catalogue number: G42
Attributed retailer: Liberty & Co, Ltd
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1968

The chair seat is similar to the Liberty & Co. “Thebes” stool which was inspired by ancient Egyptian furniture and first used on chairs designed by Holman Hunt in 1856-7 and Ford Madox Brown c. 1858. Several versions of chairs with this type of seat were produced by different firms, including Liberty & Co. The “Thebes” stool by Liberty & Co. was closely modelled on the four-legged Egyptian stool at the British Museum (BM 2472) and the Liberty designs were registered at the Patent Offfice in 1884 and were products of Liberty’s Furnishing and Decorating Studio established under Leonard Wyburd’s direction in 1883.

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