Kelmscott House...

Kelmscott House

An armoury of weapons against the weariness of life; such was the metaphor used by William Morris to describe the ideal book. How weary would he feel today, if he could merely glimpse our present society? He who fought for ‘beauty accessible for all’ in a world where art, design, form and content would together embellish and enhance the life of all social classes, what would he say? 

                                      

This great man, born into Victorian England (1834-1896), battled for reform against the social hardship, material poverty and cultural and spiritual impoverishment that arose as dehumanizing externalities from the great industrial and technological advances that marked Queen Victoria’s reign. For him, these wrongs could be largely redressed by the arts in their purest form, created and crafted by human hands to serve the people, far from the enslavement of industrial-scale manufacturing and consumption. 

I love the man standing proud up on the roof to watch the race!

It seems to me that the only thing clutched in a human hand today is some smart device that saps away our attention span and real-life exchanges so that we depend on it for every conceivable form of social validation, stimulation and even self-identity. Any kind of creative process is now readily handed over to some labour and time-saving AI app, freeing us to indulge ourselves in something supposedly more meaningful and worthwhile. But with our curiosity, focus and general interest in the world in front of us in real-time shot to pieces, what is there left that has genuine enduring meaning and actual worth in our lives? 

The Morris & Burne-Jones families - 1874

As for the social aspect of social media, do we truly have better relations today than in the past? Is communication better, even if the means to communicate have undeniably been facilitated beyond expectation? For all that we have gained, I think we have given up far more, imperceptible aspects of normal life that have been lost, and that loss will only become apparent once the ugliness and emptiness have taken a firm grip on so many areas of life these days. 

Edward Burne-Jones & William Morris

Visiting Kelmscott House, Morris’s final home, set by the Thames in the Hammersmith district, is an antidote to all that ugliness around us in the present. Although probably best known for his aesthetic vision and Art & Crafts decorative art – especially the Strawberry Thief motif – Morris was also a writer, poet, printer and socialist and, for his last 18 years, this house was where he pursued and developed this amalgam of interests. 

For Morris, art was the expression of Man’s joy in labour, a devotion of which the worker had been robbed due to the industrial capitalism that drove Victorian England. As the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood before him, Morris was driven by a quasi-religious vision of artistic creation in Medieval times – prior to 16th century Renaissance art. Just how ‘joyful’ the creative process actually was for the average Medieval craftsman is questionable, but it can probably be safely assumed to differ with Morris’s notion!

Nevertheless, the purity of Medievel art with its breathtaking realism and stunning detail rendered in vibrant, bright colours inspired Morris just as it had his Pre-Raphaelite brothers. For Morris, however, this inspiration was more than purely aesthetic, it was social too and it is interesting - and perhaps not entirely surprising - to learn that he had initially wished to join the clergy before devoting himself to art and design and specifically the Arts & Crafts Movement. By the time Morris and his family – wife Jane and their two daughters, Jenny and May – had settled in Kelmscott House, the decorative arts firm Morris & Co was fully established, having taken over from the initial business Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co had set up in 1861 with artists including Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 

Before moving into the Thames-side house, Morris expressed the intention to ‘make it beautiful with a touch of my art’, giving it the name Kelmscott House in honour of Kelmscott Manor House, his idyllic Cotswold retreat which had inspired a number of his famous designs, notably the Strawberry Thief! The interiors were duly transformed in line with Morris’s aesthetic vision, but it was clear that the home was to be more than a mere family residence, decorated to his personal taste.

 Indeed, Kelmscott House would become the place where designs and projects were brought to life through experimentation in craftsmanship and social thought carried out by Morris, his daughters and visitors; artists and social activists alike. The house became the physical expression and catalyst for Morris’s philosophy, to create a world of beauty and fairness ‘By people, for people’. 

His daughter May stated ‘Our home was a workshop of love; where art and life were inseparable’, having grown up in a unique universe, which was both rich and yet strangely pure, compared to stifling Victoriana homes with their predilection for clutter. Jane Morris, former muse and model to the Pre-Raphaelite artists, taught her daughters embroidery following traditional techniques and May proved to be so gifted that she was appointed head of the embroidery department at Morris & Co in 1885, at the age of 23, and herself designed the wallpaper design ‘Honeysuckle’. 

'Honeysuckle'

Prior to his Kelmscott years, Morris attempted to master the technique of hand-knitted carpets inspired by Persian rugs and large-scale tapestries following Medieval tradition and work practices – he even set up a loom in his bedroom! He experimented with natural pigments for the dyeing process with his daughter, May, believing that modern chemicals could not match the quality and beauty that emanated from the integrity of ‘honest’ materials and ancestral methods. 

The production facilities of the William Morris company moved to Merton Abbey in 1881 in order to follow through this practice of time-trusted techniques that had fallen by the wayside in the pursuit of speed efficiency and cost-effectiveness. In the former monastic grounds, the water flowing from the River Wandle was used to carry out hand block-printing and weaving in the same manner as in previous centuries, contrary to the modern practices employed by the fellow textile printing company, Liberty.

Steps up to the back garden at Kelmscott

With the same intense devotion, Morris turned to his other great interest during his Kelmscott House years; book-printing. With a reverence for books that were ‘a well of life’ and a ‘mirror of the soul’, Morris stated that a library was a creative well-spring, and he hoped to live in a society ‘with a public library on each street corner’. 

Drawers of movable type sorts

Certainly the library in the Morris household was a revered place of beauty and reflection, a sanctuary that held his precious collection of works that embodied his creative vision; Medieval manuscripts, historical tomes, a 15th century illuminated Book of Hours, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales…

In 1891, Morris set up his own private press in the family home with three Albion machines – the Kelmscott Press – in order to create the ‘ideal book’ that would reject the contemporary industrial process and produce, in favour of the beauty of medieval-inspired design, poetic and historical content partly influenced by Icelandic sagas and mythology, original typefaces and wood-block illustrations. I loved the fact that the very press itself had large squat paws on the base of its strong legs, showing again that there could be beauty in design and utility. 

What would Morris make of the extensive closure of public libraries across the UK, that has been taking place over the last decades due to financial pressure and budget prioritization? The creation and funding of free libraries for all, established by the successive Public Libraries Acts from the mid-19th century is slowly being over-turned and these grand civic buildings are now turned over to other activities or sold on for lucrative property development. Meanwhile, the book itself has suffered an insidious decline as the physical text is often perceived as too time-consuming, cumbersome and slow-to-deliver in a world that demands stimulation and rewards at a click, a swipe and a like. 

A wearisome world indeed…. And while we often feel enslaved to our jobs, surely we have already become slaves to our screens and apps, becoming dumber as they become ever smarter? What would Morris have to say to Elon Musk, I wonder?  

Winterbourne House and Gardens...

As time goes by, and I have a clearer idea of what I personally find aesthetically pleasing, I apply a form of selective vision to block out all that is visually unsettling – or just plain ugly. From there, I am free to play in my mind’s eye – imagining another version of reality around me, without the majority of the modern ‘improvements’ which are born of natural progress, pushed through by social and economic necessity. Sometimes, I get carried away in this game of mental photoshop and extend it to its very limits.

A liberal dose of artistic license includes a shameful glossing-over the harder aspects of life past and present and probably results in picture-postcard quaint, with a distinct whiff of gentrification, but there you have it... However, this readjusted reality it is an effective means of escaping dreary 21st century views. Landscapes with their urban development - all typically monopolized by concrete slabs, glass casing and plastic panels - are conveniently rearranged to the flights of fancy and fantasy. Some places, fortunately, require little visual tweaking and on my recent trip to Birmingham, I revisited one of these….

Winterbourne House and its extensive grounds is a perfect example of an Edwardian Arts and Crafts villa and botanic gardens. Often somewhat overshadowed by its better-known neighbour, the Birmingham Botanical Gardens and Glasshouses, Winterbourne is set in the leafy suburb of Edgbaston, yet is surprising close to the city centre . So close, indeed, that across the lake can be seen the latest high-rise constructions… Suffice it to say that these were hastily banished from my line of vision! I wonder what John Nettlefold would say of these new towers of modernity, as the industrialist who commissioned the building of this elegant country estate and himself a pioneer in housing reform in Birmingham? The principals that he held dear in the realisation of Winterbourne were also key to his philosophy in town planning, later visible in Harbourne’s Moor Pool Estate. Inspired by Bournville, he sought to provide decent homes for the working classes with housing that would enhance quality of life.

Coming from a wealthy family and working at Guest, Keen & Nettlefold (GKN) – the world’s largest screw, nut and bolt manufacturer - it is probably safe to assume that Nettlefold and his wife Margaret already had a fairly decent quality of life. They were, in fact, second cousins from the Chamberlain family and wished to live in a home that reflected their vision and was in harmony with its natural setting. They opted for a design in the Arts and Crafts style and the house was built to incorporate all the latest amenities that modern technology could offer at the turn of the century; running hot water, electric lighting and telephones.

Built by Birmingham architect Joseph Lancaster Ball, Winterbourne was based on the simple, spacious layouts of 17th century farmhouses making the home light, comfortable and unfussy. This was a far cry from the heavy, dark upholstered interiors of the Victorian era, as was the house’s relationship with the gardens that surrounded it. Light, airy rooms, largely south-east facing, look onto the gardens and are flooded by natural light whilst the French doors on the ground floor open directly onto a terrace that once served as an extended living room. I could almost imagine hearing the clink of china and the noise of croquet being played out at teatime on the lawns!

One of the tenets of the Arts and Crafts movement was the use of simple, natural materials and local craftsmanship and Winterbourne house and outbuildings were indeed built of characteristic Brummie redbrick with casement windows. The decorative wall panels of the interiors were the work of George Bankart, a craftsman who led a revival of 16th and 17th century plasterwork in the region. These are all based on natural forms - plants and animals - and are in line with the movement’s use of flora and fauna in ornamentation, textiles and wallcovering, all exemplified, of course by the work of William Morris.

Throughout the home, there was a harmony between utility and beauty – again a key principal in Arts and Crafts design and a calm still seems to reign there today. When Winterbourne was finally restored to its former Edwardian glory in 2010 - after years serving as halls of residence and classrooms and then left empty – Morris wallpaper and Edwardian furnishings were used throughout to recapture the unique mood of the period.

I did wonder if it was actually quite so beautifully decorated back in its early days but that certainly wasn’t a major preoccupation for me as I walked along the spacious corridors, from room to room, imagining the life that Winterbourne’s inhabitants once led there -without any inevitable hardship, of course. For indeed, as any family, whatever their financial situation, the Nettlefolds did experience pain and loss. Not only did two of their eight children die, but John Nettlefold suffered a mental breakdown that probably led to the sale of Winterbourne in 1919.

Although the name Winterbourne is closely associated with the Nettlefolds for whom it had been specifically designed in 1903, when they left just 16 years later, it went on to belong to two subsequent families. The final occupant of Winterbourne - John MacDonald Nicolson - was a keen gardener who added additional features such as the Japanese bridge and the scree garden to the original grounds. Nevertheless, he maintained the harmony created by Margaret Nettlefold’s designs which had been inspired by the gardening theory of Gertrude Jekyll, with emphasis on utility and beauty.

Today, Winterbourne encompasses both house and grounds – it is no longer considered as separate entities, as had been the case on the death of the last owner, Nicolson, in 1944. Indeed, he had bequeathed house and garden to the University of Birmingham with the botanic garden becoming the main focus of the acquisition for research by the School of Botany.

As with the house, the seven-acre grounds have been restored to their former splendour and the garden was Grade II listed by English Heritage in 2008. So it is that we can walk around Winterborne today, across lawns, beside sandstone rock gardens, along woodland walks, and into greenhouses. We can wander next to the geometric patterns of the walled garden and find ourselves surrounded by ‘traditional’ English plants but then discover exotic species from all across the world.

Winterbourne now offers public events, alongside a variety of courses, talks and workshops. A simple visit to house and gardens is made all the more enjoyable by a trip to the café, serving all the usual teatime treats on a daily basis – on William Morris trays, no less. The latter can also be purchased in the shop, incidentally… The second-hand bookshop in one of the former outhouses also has a great selection of books and even the outside toilet was pretty.

All in all, Winterbourne was the perfect experience on a grey day at the end of August; in my head I was enjoying its sunlight spaces at the turn of the 19th century! Below is one of a series of linocut works by the artist Sarah Moss in 2018 - They Called it Winterbourne, inspired by a William Morris woodcut.

Visual Catnip...William de Morgan and William Morris...

Design for printed fabric - Honeysuckle - William Morris - 1874

Over the new year period, on a trip to Birmingham I went back to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. I love being there and going back to the paintings, ceramics and sculptures that feel like a remote backcloth to life. Born in Brum, but leaving the Black Country for the West Country as a child, meant that ‘The City of a Thousand Trades’ was linked to visits to the family and the familiar ; the art gallery and the jewellery quartier. 

The Blind Girl - John Everett Millais - 1856

The Pre-Raphaelite room in the gallery mesmerized me from my earliest years. I used to be shown the intricate details on the painting – painstakingly realised with such realism and in such iridescent colours. Yet with age, at one stage I grew tired of this visual overload, and shrugged it off as Victorian excess, as heavy and stifling as the typical 19th century home interior. However this tardive teenage rejection did not last long. I took up a more objective vision of art and its appreciation in general and no longer felt the need to be apologetic about any admiration I might feel for any aspect of any kind of art. Why should you feel intimidated by the dictates of (someone else’s) taste ? Or the new directives imposed on past works and visions that have been taken out of context ? I was very sad to see that the painting that had absolutely fascinated me in childhood (Hylas and the Nymphs – J.W Waterhouse 1896) had been removed from Manchester art gallery due to issues concerning the portrayal of women and their assigned role in society/life. 

Hylas and the Nymphs - J.W Waterhouse - 1896 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jacobolus)

Despite being ill for my latest visit to the art gallery, I did manage to make my way up to the permanent display of ceramics and tilework in the decorative art section of the applied art collection. This is housed on the open upper floor of the imposing ‘greenhouse’ gallery structure - typical of the Victorian age and widely found in libraries and stations with characteristic expanses of glass supported by ornate wrought iron. 

Design for wallpaper - Wild Tulip - William Morris - 1884

As always, one of the key exhibits on display here was work by William de Morgan (1839 – 1917). His art - pottery and ceramics - exemplifies the social and aesthetic values of the Arts and Craft Movement, just like the work of his friend, William Morris (1834 – 1896). Both men were born at a time when mass manufacturing was being driven and enabled by the industrial revolution, and was transforming life in 19th century Britain. Likewise they had witnessed first-hand the saturation of every part of society by soul-less mass produced goods whose manufacture had a dehumanising effect on the labourers and each individual for whom they were destined. I can’t help but wonder what William Morris himself would think of his prints being reproduced today in order to manufacture cheap clothing for global juggernaut H & M, in conditions dictated by fast fashion? Or indeed the Strawberry Thief, amongst his other designs, being plundered to adorn every conceivable surface, from oven gloves to teaspoon rests, much in the same way that The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady ‘accessories’ were hugely commercialized in the 1980s. 

de Morgan

To mark his disapproval of a period dominated by the race for innovation and technology, William Morris refused to visit the Great Exhibition of 1851. In this machine age, when factories delivered services and manufactured goods to unprecedented levles, art had become an industrialised commodity as another. Even though the work of both Morris and de Morgan would go on to have a significant impact of the decoration of domestic interiors in the Victorian age, they practiced their respective crafts with principle. Indeed, guided by truth and beauty, they believed that craftsman should devote themselves to their art, using traditional techniques instead of mechanically churning out vast quantities of meaningless produce. Like the initial founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, they were influenced by the writings of art critic John Ruskin and yearned for a return to a purer time, exemplified by the Medieval age. 

So it was that de Morgan worked alongside Wiiliam Morris in the 1860s, producing stained glass windows with another important late Pre-Raphaelite, Edward Burne-Jones. De Morgan’s formal training as a classical artist enabled him to depict Biblical scenes and those from mythology and legends. However, by his own admission, de Morgan was more a designer than a ‘real artist’. He was fascinated with obtaining an opaque, iridescent finish on glass and this led him in other directions. Although he may have established his artistic credentials during this period of collaboration with Burne-Jones, he moved away from the portrayal of angelic, Arthurian or saintly beings. As much as I loved Burne-Jones’ paintings and stained glass when young, and still love his beautiful drawings today, there are only so many wan, winsome and wilting figures in billowing drapery you can take.

Drawing - Edward Burne-Jones

Once themes and draftsmanship become a little too standard, satiation point is soon reached, although judging by the Victorian appetite for such art, their threshold was considerably higher than mine. The paintings of de Morgan’s wife, Evelyn (1855-1919), are a case in point - for me at least. The beautifully executed recurrent female forms, striking similar poses in classical themes, soon become cloying. However it is important to realise that she was often obliged to conform to popular tastes rather than follow her own leanings since the income from her art was often the financial linchpin in the de Morgan household. Indeed, William’s scientific experiments in firing and glazing techniques from this time onwards resulted in the exploration of other forms and motifs, but did not ensure any lasting monetary gain whatsoever.

De Morgan drew inspiration from what was termed ‘Persian’ ceramics, although in fact this largely referred to16th century Islamic pottery and majolica from Italy and Spain. In this respect he resembled many other Western artists and writers who were attracted to all things Oriental. They were avid for the exotic, and eager to experience a visit to the Levant to complement or replace the more commonplace Grand Tour of Europe. William Morris himself declared: « To us pattern-designers, Persia has become a holy land».

de Morgan

With his ever-analytical, scientific mind, bolstered by a mathematical training, de Morgan found his forte in creating intricate geometric forms, playing on symmetric shapes, and tessellations. These were common in the Islamic art which he so admired, where rich floral patterns took the place of the human figures whose depiction was forbidden by faith. De Morgan departed from the staple Burne-Jones protagonists and moved away from the purely botanic-based designs of Morris. 

His ceramics were devoted to portraying a multitude of plants and mythological, fantastical and heraldic creatures portrayed in stunning patterns and colours that draw inspiration from Syrian, the Middle Eastern work, and the Iznik ware of Asian Turkey. He had seen such art first-hand when he carried out a commission in the Arab Hall of what is now Leighton House Museum. Furthermore, he would have known of the writings of Owen Jones on the subject of Islamic design from the book 'Grammar of Ornament’ (1856).

Design for wallpaper - Tulip and Willow - William Morris -1873-5

In the late 1860s, interest in home improvement was gathering momentum as changing demographics led to ever-greater property ownership. A renewed desire for tiles meant that production increased to provide surround tiles for fire places, or wall decoration and flooring in kitchens, washrooms, parlours, sitting rooms, hallways and pathways. Companies started to supply an impressive range of ‘art tiles’ to meet demand and to exhibit their wares in the international trade fairs. Yet while the work produced by ‘The Potteries’ - centred around Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire - may have made of England the most significant ceramic producers worldwide, it did not suit de Morgan’s concept of the artist potter/ceramist since it had led to uniformity without intrinsic significance. Thomas Minton and Sons perfected production techniques that enabled them to produce on an industrial scale, thus become a leading Staffordshire company throughout the Victorian era. 

de Morgan

Innovative encaustic tiles opened up additional markets and catered to new demands in tiles for public buildings, institutions and palaces, alongside home interiors. Mass-produced Minton tiles were used to replace Medieval church floors - drawing criticism from William Morris but meeting with approval from the ‘father’ of the Gothic Revival Movement – A.W Pugin. The Palace of Westminster, Victoria & Albert Museum and many other prestigious buildings were decorated using Minton tiles in England and even in the USA with the US Capitol.

de Morgan

 The need for ceramic tiles to meet the standards of the Arts and Crafts Movement led de Morgan to set up his own firm in the 1870s. The continued desire to recreate the unique finish of the rich ceramics created in 9th Century Egypt also led him to virtually burn down his workshop at one stage during a (presumably failed) experiment. Nevertheless, he did finally manage to produce lustreware with such skill that he became an expert in the field. A partnership with the architect Halsey Ricardo resulted in a number of important commissions, including Debenham House, London, in 1905 and the design of schemes for the decoration of twelve P&O liners, and the provision of tiles for the purpose. In 1883, de Morgan was also commissioned by Lewis Carroll to design several red lustre tiles featuring fantastic beasts -  a snark, jabberwock, eagle, dodo, among others – to decorate the surround of a fireplace…

https://williammorristile.com/demorgan/lewis_carroll_fireplace_tiles.html

Since de Morgan’s work has no religious content or intent per se, unlike much of the art that had inspired it, it has been criticised for being merely clever geometrical patterns that are soulless. Furthermore, the costly production processes meant that de Morgan’s creations were only truly accessible to a select public, with the obvious financial means to afford such expense. This limited their growth, posing restrictions on the public since it excluded the vast majority and ultimately had an impact on sales. In addition, aesthetics were evolving. 

Taste changes, and as no longer in the spirit of the times, De Morgan & Co folded in 1907. Having finally perfected his lustreware technique in later years, he wrily remarked that “All my life I have been trying to make beautiful things and now that I can, nobody wants them." Indeed, through concentrating on the creative process, he had overlooked the aesthetic mood at the turn of the century, with the result that his motifs and patterns appeared somewhat outdated.

de Morgan

What I find the most endearing and admirable in de Morgan is this earnest, even dogged approach to art and experimentation and the fact that despite being born into a lineage of mathematicians, he was apparently inept at managing the financial aspects of any of his endeavours. For all his love of figures and the beauty of mathematics, he was notoriously bad at the books ! He was also known for his sense of humour – shared by his wife – and again, I think that makes of de Morgan a most congenial character, very far from the dour, caricatural image we might have of the average Victorian. 

de Morgan

The expressive, organic, undulating forms and flowing lines of Art Nouveau had overtaken the heavier, history-bound, cluttered style of the 19th century. The beginnings of change had already made themselves apparent in the black-and-white illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley (1872 – 1898). His art marked a striking move away from the more reassuring style of Burne-Jones which had been a key inspiration and influence in Beardsley’s short life. Whilst Burne-Jones dealt with a dream-like domain of myth and legend, his young admirer’s Aesthetic art bordered on the nightmarish, with its troubling, almost menacing edginess. In this new climate, de Morgan’s designs no longer had their former relevance or success. The Minton company was able to adapt to the times by introducing Art Nouveau designs influenced by the Vienna Secession art movement, founded by Gustav Klimt and others ; de Morgan could not and would not make the change. On the closure of his company, he literally turned the page, and added a new chapter to his life…. through literature. 

de Morgan

It is interesting to think that over his lifetime, he was to have greater success from the novel-writing that he ultimately turned to - once the commercial opportunies of ceramics had finally failed him. Today, of course, the de Morgan name is synonymous with art, and probably not literature, even if William published seven best-selling novels in this final phase of his life, gaining him acclaim in England and the USA. 

de Morgan

These decorative arts operate as visual catnip on me – drawing me in every time. Just the name given to some of de Morgan’s iridescent finishes is enough to make me dream. Moonlight and sunset lustre… How magical is that ? 

de Morgan