Distant View of the Lake Hills from above Tirril

Details

Date: c. 1880
Object Type: glass
Material: stained, painted, leaded glass
Catalogue number: C229
Manufacturer: W.G. Saunders & Company
Merchant
Designer: Whall, Christopher Whitworth (1849 - 1924)

Part of a series of three stained glass windows made for St.Ethelreda’s Church, an important medieval building which was built as the London chapel of the Bishops of Ely. Whall was attached, as a layman, to the Rosminian religious community at St. Ethelreda’s and was asked to design the glazing of the nave windows of the church, his first commission in stained glass. Disagreements between Whall and Saunders resulted in Whall losing the commission. At some point between the early 1880s and 1900, the panel was removed from the church and was later found in storage at the Rosminian Convent in Loughborough. The panel was conserved in 1999 with a grant from the Glazier’s Trust.

Details

Date: c. 1880
Object Type: glass
Material: stained, painted, leaded glass
Catalogue number: C227
Designer: Whall, Christopher Whitworth (1849 - 1924)
Manufacturer: W.G. Saunders & Company
Merchant

Details

Object Type: glass
Material: stained, painted, leaded glass
Catalogue number: C226
Designer: Esplin, Mabel, 1874, 1921
Manufacturer: Esplin, Mabel, 1874, 1921
Credit notes: Gift of Geofrrey A.K. Robinson, 1998

Mabel Esplin studied stained glass under the tutelage of Christopher Whall (1849-1924), the leading practitioner and teacher of the craft in the turn-of-the-century Arts & Crafts Movement. Esplin attended Whall’s classes at the London County Council’s Central School of Arts & Crafts and probably also worked in his studio-workshop at 1, Ravenscourt Park, Hammersmith. On completing her studies, she set up her own studio in Hampstead, though the firing and glazing of her painted glass was always carried out at Messrs. Lowndes & Drury’s ‘Glass House’ at Fulham. This panel was probably made while Esplin was still a student. In its use of slab glass in intense, jewel-like colours and its relatively loose style of glass-painting, it is typical of the Arts & Crafts idiom developed by Whall and his school.
Esplin was a member of the Women’s Guild of Arts and a supporter of women’s suffrage. She and Mary Lowndes designed emblems for the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance.
In 1911 she received an important commission to design and make all of the windows for the new Anglican cathedral at Khartoum in Sudan, but in 1916, she suffered a serious mental illness which prematurely ended her career and led to her early death. The commission was completed by her former assistant, Joan Fulleylove.

Details

Date: 1900
Object Type: glass
Catalogue number: C222
Designer: Webb | Philip | 1831 | 1915
Manufacturer: James Powell & Sons, London
Merchant
Credit notes: Gift of Micheal Whiteway, 1996

Early in 1860, Phillip Webb designed a number of wine-glasses and other glass vessels for manufacture by James Powell & Sons, specifically for William Morris’s use at Red House. Subsequently, glasses from this series, along with others designed by Webb, were among the first products sold by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company. Around the turn of the century, manufacture of these Webb-designed glasses, with some variation in design, was revived by Powell’s and they continued in production until the 1920s/30s. This example probably dates from the c.1900 revival of the Webb range, examples of which were shown at the 1914 Exhibition of British Arts & Crafts at the Louvre, Paris.

Details

Date: c.1861
Dimensions: 59 x 32
Object Type: glass
Material: stained, painted, leaded glass
Catalogue number: C212i
Designer: Rossetti | Dante Gabriel | 1828 | 1882
Manufacturer: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.
Merchant: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.
Credit notes: Purchased with the aid of the MGC/V&A Purchase Grant Fund, the Friends of the William Morris Gallery, and an anonymous donation.

This stained glass panel of three windows depicts a portrait of Ellen Morley Heaton, and the model of a house (Woodbank), she is flanked by panels depicting her two daughter. An inscribed scroll top left reads ‘JAH EH’ (of the Heatons)/Woodbank/’DGR AD 1861′ (Rosetti’s monogram and the date of production). Although designs and cartoons for stained glass were being prepared by Rosetti and other partners in Morris Marshall Faulkner & Co from the summer of 1861 onwards, it was not until November 1861 that a glazier was employed. It is therefore possible that the Woodbank panels were the firm’s first completed commission, although other windows, for Selsley and Brighton and Darley Dale were in progress at the same time. The quality of the glass-painting, especially in the panels of the Heaton daughters, might suggest that Rosetti himself was involved in transferring his designs onto glass.

John Aldam Heaton (1830 – 1897) was a wool and textile manufacturer in Bradford. In 1860 he moved to Woodbank, an ancient farm near Harden, Bingley, in Yorkshire. Heaton invited Rossetti to paint a portrait of Ellen, his wife, and the artist stayed with them at Woodbank for a month between November and December 1861 to carry out the commission. The portrait, known as Regina Cordium (Queen of Hearts), a portrait of Mrs Ellen Heaton, subsequently formed the basis of this stained glass window for the house.

Details

Date: 1902
Object Type: glass
Material: stained, painted, leaded glass
Catalogue number: C211
Designer: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Manufacturer: Morris & Co.
Credit notes: Purchased with a grant from the Friends of the William Morris Gallery, 1994

George MacCulloch was an Australian mining magnate and patron on Morris & Co. This stained glass panel was part of a series of eight windows made for the residence and later removed from the home, along with seven other Morris & Co. windows which were sold to the trade at which time the upper and lower portions of the window may have been lost or destroyed. Burne-Jones’s ‘Praising Angel’ figure is one of four designed in 1878 for windows in Salisbury Cathedral. Subsequently, the cartoons were used for stained glass elsewhere, including Painswick church, Gloucestershire (1898) and Crescent Street Church in Montreal (1901), as well as the Mcculloch house. In 1894 the cartoons were also adapted for tapestries, of which examples exist at Brockhampton Church, Herefordshire and the V&A Museum.

Details

Object Type: glass
Material: stained, painted, leaded glass
Catalogue number: C205a
Designer: Davis, Louis B., 1861, 1941
Glass-painter: Cowell, Thomas, 1870, 1949
Manufacturer: James Powell & Sons, London

One of two stained glass panels with ‘Angel with Censer’ C205b. Louis Davis often collaborated with Thomas Cowell in the creation of stained glass windows. Over the years, the two developed a close working relationship and when Cowell came to decorate his Surbiton home with panels of stained glass, he chose to make versions of some of Davis’s church windows. The Angels in these panels are from Davis’s designs for a window at St.Anselm’s Church, Hatch End, Middlesex.

Details

Date: c. 1897
Object Type: glass
Material: stained, painted, leaded glass
Catalogue number: C76
Artist: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Glass painter: Walters, 1833, 1898
Glass painter: Wren, 1893, 1907
Glass painter: Campfield, George, 1861, 1898

St. Cecilia was made 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. A small scale drawing, annotated ‘The Hill, Witley’, is in the Gallery’s collection (BL A 313).

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).

During the early years of the Firm, Morris & Co. had a close association with ‘The Hill’ house when it was owned by Myles Birket Foster. The house contained several works by Burne-Jones, Rosetti, Ford Madox Brown, and Morris & Co. Stained glass windows within the home included a series of 7 panels designed by Burne-Jones illustrating Chaucer’s ‘Good Women’, a series of roundels containing classical and Chaucerian heroines, Chaucer himself, Homer, King David and St.Cecilia, also by Burne-Jones. Four panels, ‘Architecture’ (Madox Brown), ‘Music’ (Rosetti), ‘Painting’ (Burne-Jones) and ‘Sculpture’ (Burne-Jones), illustrating imaginary incidents in King Rene’s Honeymoon and which are probably those now in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Phillip Webb’s account book contains two references to furniture designs for Birket Foster – a design for a cabinet for Foster’s pictures (1.1.1866), and a design for a book case (8.2.1868). Apart from a series of seven canvases painted by Burne-Jones with the story of St.George which formed a frieze around three sides of the dining room and a screen with 16 scenes from the Life of St.Frideswide made up of cartoons for the window designed by Burne-Jones for the Latin Chapel in Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford. Burne-Jones also designed a number of tile panels which were made by Morris & Co. – a series of tiles with the story of Cinderella for a fireplace in one of the ground floor rooms and tile panels with the story of Sleeping Beauty and ‘Beauty and the Beast’ for the bedrooms. The latter is now in the WMG (C75).

Details

Date: 1913
Dimensions: 25.5 x 35
Object Type: watercolour
Material: watercolour and gouache on paper
Catalogue number: BrW33
Artist: Goodwin, Albert, 1845, 1932
Credit notes: Brangwyn gift, 1935

Goodwin was born in Maidstone in Kent, the son of a builder and one of 9 children. After leaving school he became an apprentice draper. His exceptional artistic ability was recognised at an early age and he went on to study with the Pre-Raphaelite artists Arthur Hughes and Ford Madox Brown – the latter predicting that he would become “one of the greatest landscape painters of the age”.

At the age of 15 his first painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy. He became an associate member of the Royal Watercolour Society (RWS) in 1876. He was championed by famed art critic John Ruskin who took him on a tour of Europe, where he made many sketches from nature which were later turned into watercolours. During his lifetime he traveled extensively throughout Britain, Europe and South America. This watercolour depicts a carnival at night in Venezuela where he traveled in 1913.

Details

Date: 1899
Dimensions: 25 x 37
Object Type: watercolour
Material: pencil and watercolour on paper
Catalogue number: BrW30
Artist: Fletcher, Hanslip, 1875, 1955
Credit notes: Brangwyn gift, 1936

This is one of a series of sketches of Kelmscott Manor by the artist Hanslip Fletcher, during a visit to Kelmscott on 7th August 1899. Morris had died three years earlier in 1896, and the house was occupied by Jane Morris, who later bought it in 1913. The watercolour shows William Morris’s bedroom, with its four poster bed hung with embroideries executed by Jane and May Morris.

Fletcher was an etcher, illustrator and painter specialising in architectural studies of London and elsewhere. He was born and lived in London and was a member of the Art Workers’ Guild.

Details

Date: 1899
Dimensions: 28.5 x 40
Object Type: watercolour
Catalogue number: BrW29
Artist: Fletcher, Hanslip, 1875, 1955
Credit notes: Brangwyn gift, 1936

This is one of a series of sketches of Kelmscott Manor by the artist Hanslip Fletcher, during a visit to Kelmscott on 7th August 1899. Morris had died three years earlier in 1896, and the house was occupied by Jane Morris, who later bought it in 1913. The watercolour shows the so called Green Room, the walls hung with fabric and a large gate-legged table in the centre with two candlesticks, designed by Philip Webb. An overmantel, also designed by Webb is also visible above the fireplace.

Fletcher was an etcher, illustrator and painter specialising in architectural studies of London and elsewhere. He was born and lived in London and was a member of the Art Workers’ Guild.

Details

Date: c.1892
Dimensions: 93.1 x 114.8
Object Type: glass
Material: stained, painted, leaded glass
Catalogue number: C194
Designer: Image, Selwyn, 1849, 1930
Manufacturer: James Powell & Sons, London

The stained glass was made by James Powell & Sons from Selwyn Image’s cartoons. The window was originally in Soham House, Newmarket, Suffolk, which was probably designed by the architect C.J. Harold Cooper. The “Brownies” depicted are from Juliana Horatia Ewing’s children’s book of the same title. For a similar window, see H. Muthesius THE ENGLISH HOUSE (English Trans. 1979 p. 205, illus.) For an illustration of Soham House see ‘Modern British Domestic Architecture & Decoration’ edited by Charles Holme (Studio Special Number 1901, p.66).

Details

Date: 1899
Dimensions: 25 x 37
Object Type: watercolour
Catalogue number: BrW27
Artist: Fletcher, Hanslip, 1875, 1955
Credit notes: Brangwyn gift, 1936

This is one of a series of sketches of Kelmscott Manor by the artist Hanslip Fletcher, during a visit to Kelmscott on 7th August 1899. Morris had died three years earlier in 1896, and the house was occupied by Jane Morris, who later bought it in 1913. The watercolour shows the Tapestry Room, with Morris’s desk in the centre and various chairs, including a Morris & Co. rush seated chair in the background.

Fletcher was an etcher, illustrator and painter specialising in architectural studies of London and elsewhere. He was born and lived in London and was a member of the Art Workers’ Guild.

Details

Date: 1868
Dimensions: 62 x 48
Object Type: watercolour
Material: watercolour and gouache on paper
Catalogue number: BrW12
Artist: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Credit notes: Brangwyn gift, 1937

The romantic story of the chivalrous knight who became England’s patron saint appealed strongly to Morris’s artistic circle. Burne-Jones featured him in a series of painted panels for the dining room in Miles Birket Foster’s Surrey home. He made this watercolour shortly afterwards.

Legend had it that the dragon was terrorising the inhabitants of Silene (possibly Cyrene in modern Libya), who appeased it with animal and human sacrifices. George, a Roman soldier, appears just as the young princess Sabra is about to be sacrificed. Protected by the sign of the cross, George slays the dragon.

Burne-Jones’s treatment of the tale is lyrical rather than dramatic; the struggle isn’t violent, and the princess is relegated to the background. He based the dragon (whose armadillo-like skin echoes the knight’s armour) on a late-medieval German print.

Details

Date: c.1870
Dimensions: 63 x 45
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on canvas
Catalogue number: O127
Artist: Murray, Charles Fairfax, 1849, 1919
Credit notes: Presented by Mrs Stephanie Godwin, 1993

This portrait of William Morris, painted when he was about 36 years old, was owned by his mother, Emma. It shows a typical Victorian gentleman, sombrely dressed, regarding the viewer with thoughtful eyes. Morris had a complicated relationship with his family, whose financial interests and social conservatism were in direct opposition to his own Socialist beliefs. Emma was bitterly upset when William decided against becoming a clergyman in order to follow a career in the arts. He was aware of her feelings of disappointment, writing to her that his four brothers “shall keep up the family honour in the World and perhaps even I myself shall not utterly disgrace it”. This portrait suggests that Emma was ultimately proud of her eldest surviving son, though preferred to think of him as an educated gentleman rather than a radical artist.

Fairfax Murray was taken up by the art critic John Ruskin and age 16 was installed as Edward Burne-Jone’s first studio assistant in 1867. He quickly became acquainted with Pre-Raphaelite founder Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the friend of William Morris and Philip Webb. He was given work as artist and glass-painter for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., working to Burne Jones’s designs and also illuminated Morris’s manuscripts. A watercolur of Morris by Fairfax Murray from the same time is in the National Portrait Gallery’s collection (3652).

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