William Morris
Father of the Arts and Crafts movement.
William Morris was a designer, poet and socialist. He designed wallpapers, textiles and books and wanted everyday things to be both beautiful and honestly made.
William Morris was born in 1834 in Walthamstow outside London into a wealthy family. He studied at Exeter College, Oxford, where he became a lifelong friend of Edward Burne-Jones. Both read John Ruskin, who taught them that medieval craftsmen had worked with joy and that industry was ruining both work and things. Morris first intended to become a clergyman, then an architect, and worked for a time for the architect George Edmund Street, where he met Philip Webb.
In 1859 he married Jane Burden, a model for the Pre-Raphaelites, and Webb designed their home, Red House in Bexleyheath. When furnishing the house, the friends discovered how hard it was to find beautiful and well-made objects. In 1861 they therefore founded the firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., which from 1875 was called Morris & Co. It made stained glass, furniture, wallpapers, textiles and embroidery. Among the best-known patterns are the wallpapers Trellis and Daisy and the textile Strawberry Thief of 1883, printed with indigo in the workshops at Merton Abbey.
Morris taught himself the crafts from the ground up: dyeing with vegetable dyes, weaving, printing and embroidery. His patterns are based on careful studies of plants and birds and on medieval models. The forms are densely interwoven but clearly ordered. In a lecture he said that one should have nothing in one's house that one does not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
Morris was also a successful poet and translated Icelandic sagas after journeys to Iceland in the 1870s. His marriage was complicated, since Jane had a long relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with whom Morris shared the country house Kelmscott Manor. In 1877 he founded a society to protect old buildings from heavy-handed restoration. From the 1880s he was an active socialist, spoke on the streets and wrote the utopia News from Nowhere. In 1891 he founded the Kelmscott Press, whose Chaucer of 1896 is counted among the most beautiful books ever printed.
Morris died in 1896. His patterns are still produced, and the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London have large collections. He inspired the Arts and Crafts movement all over the world and influenced attitudes to design, craft, book art and heritage well into our own time.