William Morris - Founder of the Arts & Crafts Movement

This was a turning point in the lives of the two young men. They had both been destined for the Church but instead Morris decided to become an architect and Burne-Jones a painter.

It wasn’t, however, quite the Damascene conversion that it appears because both men had been interested in the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood before they saw the painting by one of its leading lights.

Ever since the mid 1700s there had been intermittent interest in Gothic style which reached its heights with the Brotherhood. They scorned contemporary art, seeing it as stylised and soulless. They looked back to the medieval period for inspiration with work characterised by dreamy romanticism and meticulous detail. John Ruskin was the philosopher behind the Brotherhood and the later Arts and Crafts Movement. He believed that making objects by machine had a dehumanising effect on the worker by removing him from the artistic process and even from nature itself.

If Ruskin provided the intellectual inspiration, eventually it was Morris who became the leading light of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Perhaps it began while Morris was working as an articled clerk to Gothic Revivalist architect, George Edmund Street who believed that an architect should influence all aspects of a building including the interior decoration and textiles. There Morris met Phillip Webb, a senior articled clerk, who was destined to become a close friend and collaborator.

By this time they were involved with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood started by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais whose painting had produced such a change of direction for both men.

In 1856, Steet moved his practice to London. There Morris shared rooms with his old friend Edward Burne-Jones. Unable to buy furniture they liked, the two young men designed their own. This was made by a local carpenter and would have looked at home in any medieval castle. The chairs had scenes on them painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti while Philip Webb designed a wardrobe which was painted by Burne-Jones—now in the Ashmoleum Museum in Oxford. Another piece, now in the V&A, and perhaps the most famous, is a long settle with a dresser above, painted by both Rossetti and Burne-Jones.

William Morris undertook his first and only attempt at embroidery for these rooms. Now known as the ‘If I Can’ embroidered wall hanging, it illustrates his philosophy of design. He believed that a designer should understand the practicalities of transferring a design from the drawing board to finished object.

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Copyright © 2005 Carol Fisher