William Morris
Marlborough College, Marlborough, Wiltshire, England
Exeter College, University of Oxford
Exeter College, University of Oxford
Exeter College, University of Oxford
Exeter College, University of Oxford
Marlborough College, Marlborough, Wiltshire, England
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artist critic designer manufacturer socialist poet
Morris was born on March 24, 1834 in Walthamstow, United Kingdom. His father, of Welsh descent, was a discount broker and a man of wealth; his mother, of English descent, came from a long line of landed proprietors and prosperous merchants.
In February 1848, Morris entered Marlborough College to prepare for Oxford. After graduation Morris studied architecture, then painting. In 1853 Morris went to Exeter College at the University of Oxford.
Originally intended for holy orders, Morris decided to take up the "useful trade" of architect after reading Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, and he was apprenticed to G. E. Street, who had a considerable ecclesiastical practice, in 1856. But Burne-Jones introduced him to the group of artists known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and by the end of the year Dante Gabriel Rossetti had advised him to become a painter, which he did.
In 1875 Morris reorganized the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company and became sole owner. He himself designed furniture (the Morris chair has become a classic), wallpaper, and textiles. Literary Career Morris's literary career had commenced at Oxford, where he wrote prose romances for the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.
His fame was confined to a small circle of admirers until The Earthy Paradise (3 vols. , 1868 - 1870) established him as a major romantic poet. He chose the device of legendary poems from classical and medieval sources recited by Norwegian seamen who had sailed westward to find the earthly paradise.
In 1868 Morris took up the study of Icelandic, published a translation of the Grettis Saga with the assistance of Eiríkr Magnússon (1869), and visited Iceland in 1871 and 1873.
He died at Kelmscott House on October 3, 1896. Morris's plea for an integrated society in which everything made by man should be beautiful radically distinguishes him from other social theorists. His insistence on beauty as a central goal makes most modern approaches to a welfare society seem lacking in an essential nobility. For him art was the very highest of realities, the spontaneous expression of the pleasure of life innate in the whole people.
Associated with the British Arts and Crafts Movement, he was a major contributor to the revival of traditional British textile arts and methods of production. He was one of the most versatile and influential men of his age, was the last of the major English romantics and a leading champion and promoter of revolutionary ideas as poet, critic, artist, designer, manufacturer, and socialist.
In 1861 he founded the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company to carry out in furniture, decoration, and the applied arts the artistic concepts of his friends.
Morris also translated The Aeneids (sic; 1875), the Odyssey (1887), Beowulf (1895), and Old French Romances (1896). He regarded as his finest literary achievement Sigurd the Volsung, and Fall of the Niblungs (1876), his own retelling in verse of the Icelandic prose Volsunga saga, a version J. W. Mackail (1899) described as "the most Homeric poem which has been written since Homer. "
He also founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877 and the Kelmscott press in 1890.
Morris first entered the arena of politics in 1876 to attack Disraeli's Tory government and call for British intervention against the Turks for savagely suppressing a nationalist revolt of oppressed Bulgarians. In his appeal To the Working Men of England (1877) he denounced capitalist selfishness on grounds that appealed to both Liberals and Communists. The debate on Morris as a Socialist has given rise to a considerable literature, for the nobility of his utterances led almost every political camp to claim him, including orthodox Marxists.
In January 1883, Morris was enrolled among the members of the Democratic Federation, forerunner of the Social Democratic Federation. Over the next two years, Morris and party founder Henry Hyndman worked together as the best-known leaders of the fledgling organisation.[16] For the rest of the decade, his creative efforts sprang from his socialist politics.
In 1886 Friedrich Engels described him scornfully as "a settled sentimental Socialist. "
In 1891 Morris withdrew from intensive socialistic propaganda to devote his time to the interests of his firm, the work of various societies of which he was a member, and the printing of fine books by his newly organized Kelmscott Press.
From a series of notable homes-the Red House, Upton, Kent; Kelmscott Manor on the upper Thames; and Kelmscott House, Morris's London house from 1878-he carried on a prodigious activity as a public speaker, member of committees and radical organizations, and leader of the Arts and Craft movement.
An esthetic doctrine underlies his most political writings, like The Dream of John Ball (1888). Paradoxically, the designer-manufacturer who failed to grasp the esthetic possibilities of the machine was the father of modern industrial design, which aims to create a beautiful environment for mankind freed from poverty. A notable advance on his theory was made by the Bauhaus, the famed school of architecture and applied art in Germany, where Walter Gropius and his colleagues applied Morris's principles to the machine and scientific technology.
It was observed “how decisive he was: how accurate, without any effort or formality: what an extraordinary power of observation lay at the base of many of his casual or incidental remarks.”
Physical Characteristics: Morris appears at this time, in the memoirs of the painter Val Prinsep, as “a short square man with spectacles and a vast mop of dark hair.”
In 1859 Morris married Jane Burden, a Rossetti-type beauty; they had two daughters, Jane and Mary (May).
partner in the firm of Sanderson & Co
1804–1894
1839–1914
1842–1923
1861–1935
1862–1938
She was a noted embroidery designer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as a model for painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
He met Edward Jones (later the painter and designer Burne-Jones) while attending Oxford, who was to become his lifelong friend.
After his marriage, Morris commissioned his friend the architect Philip Webb, whom he had originally met in Street’s office, to build the Red House at Bexleyheath (so called because it was built of red brick when the fashion was for stucco villas).
