Stained Glass Panel

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).

Details

Date: 1900
Dimensions: 153 x 92
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on canvas
Catalogue number: O110
Artist: Crane, Walter, 1845, 1915
Credit notes: Transfer, 1964

The painting was done at the time of the Boer War of 1900 of which Crane was a bitter opponent, and when the Fabians failed to oppose the war, Crane along with other members including Ramsay Macdonald resigned from the Fabian Society. The alternative title, A Stranger, was intended to symbolise the estrangement of peace from the world. A similar figure, presenting olive branches to two wounded combatants, appears in Crane’s cartoon to commemorate the ending of the Boer War, published in the Daily News, 2 June 1902.

Details

Date: c. 1881
Dimensions: 49 x 39
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on canvas
Catalogue number: O87
Artist: Burne-Jones | Edward Coley | Sir | 1833 | 1898
Credit notes: WMG purchase, 1954

The image was based on a stained glass panel that Burne-Jones designed in 1878, one of a set of nine representing the Planets. Formerly depicting a full-length nude seated on a rock, in 1958 the canvas was cut down to its present size. The discarded canvas was not kept nor was a photographic record taken of the painting in its original state.

The stained glass was made by Morris & Co for the music room at ‘Woodlands’, the home of Sir Angus Holden situated on the outskirts of Bradford, Yorkshire. The stained glass no longer survives but the cartoons, including ‘The Evening Star’, are now at Torre Abbey, Torquay, Devon.

Details

Date: c.1830-56
Dimensions: 18.6 x 12.5
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on card
Catalogue number: BrO81
Artist: Chasseriau, Theodore, 1819, 1856
Credit notes: Brangwyn gift, 1948

Small oil sketch on board of two young women dressed in Empire-line dresses. It was painted by the Dominican-born French Romantic painter Theodore Chasseriau.

Details

Date: 1863
Dimensions: 36.2 x 51.4
Object Type: oil
Material: oil on canvas
Catalogue number: BrO53
Artist: Scott, William Bell, 1811, 1890
Credit notes: Brangwyn gift, 1938

This painting shows a rock-strewn beach on the north-east coast of England. The rather melancholy character of the scene is emphasised by the carcass of a dead sea bird in the foreground and the ghostly silhouettes of two sailing ships in the distance. Son of Robert Scott, an Edinburgh engraver, and brother of the historical painter David Scott, William Bell Scott studied under his father and at Trustee’ Academy before moving to London in 1837. In 1843 he was appointed master of the Government School of Design in Newcastle, where his influence did much to popularise the work of the Pre-Raphaelites. The painting is one of several empty seascape scenes by Scott, dating from the 1860s including ‘The Incoming Tide’ (1861) , ‘North Sea by Moonlight’ (1863) and ‘Breakers on a Beach’ (1864). This painting, with its carefully delineated foreground detail of rocks, pebbles and seaweed, illustrates fully the impact of Pre-Raphaelitism on Scott’s work. The art historian Allen Staley however argues that the twilight, the emptiness of the composition and the overall lack of subject matter show the influence of German Romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich. Scott was the author of books on Durer and on modern German painting in the 1870s. He was also a poet and his ‘Autobiographical Notes’ provide an interesting record of his friendship with Rosetti, Morris and other artists.

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