Morris & Co.

William Morris is one of Britain’s most influential artist and designers. Working in the second half of the nineteenth century, he is famous for his wallpapers, textiles and furnishing designs. A key exponent of the arts and crafts movement, Morris rejected the rise of industrialisation in the nineteenth century, instead championing traditional handmade methods of production for art and decorative arts. He was a deeply politicised figure and had strong socialist views. He believed that art should be for everyone, stating ‘I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few’.

Morris’ firm, Morris and Co. (originally established in 1861 as Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.), produced a wealth of printed and woven fabrics, carpets, rugs, embroidery, tapestries and wallpaper, including this work, titled Apple wallpaper (blue), in 1877. The repeating pattern combines apples and scrolling acanthus leaves and was inspired by English gardens and hedgerows. Morris researched and promoted historical printing and dyeing techniques, such as block printing, and produced his designs ‘from scratch’, an approach that was to become a hallmark of his career.

For contemporary audiences the work of the British artist and designer William Morris is unlikely to conjure ideas of radicalism. Beyond the creator of seemingly ‘traditional’ repeating design of thrushes nibbling strawberries, and swirling acanthus plants, there was an artist and designer whose practice was founded on ideas of socialism and the rights of workers, as well as someone who displayed an affinity with the suffrage movement.

The arts and crafts movement of the late nineteenth century, of which Morris was the key proponent, introduced an important aesthetic and practice-based change to art in the Western world. Arising in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, the British Arts and Crafts Movement represented a reaction to the poor working conditions of the time; namely, intensive mechanised and assembly-line manufacturing – a direct consequence of the Industrial Revolution. Underpinned by the socialist views of Morris, the movement was inspired by a belief that historical craft practices could produce consumer goods of a higher quality and, in the process, create better conditions for the workers. Manufacturing carpets, textiles, stained-glass windows and furniture that used traditional, handmade techniques, Morris, through his company Morris & Co., resurrected medieval craftsmanship. He firmly believed that art should be both beautiful and functional and that it should be experienced by everyone in the domestic space and not remain solely in the domain of the wealthy. His revolution in decorative arts was aesthetic as much as it was social.

Morris’s early exposure to medieval and early modern tapestries in Britain and France laid the foundation for both his aesthetic and technical approach to tapestry work, and in 1877 when he embarked upon the establishment of a tapestry workshop for his firm, he sought to revive techniques from the Medieval and Early Modern periods. Morris considered tapestry the highest form of textile art and the firm’s tapestries are among the greatest achievements of late nineteenth-century textile design.1

The tapestry The Adoration of the Magi, believed to be number six of ten, dates to the later part of Morris’s life and was made by the firm after his death. Designed by the key Morris collaborators, Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898) and J.H. Dearle (1860–1932) – to whom the floral decoration is attributed – the tapestry was commissioned in the early twentieth century by the Adelaide businessman and collector Sir George Brookman (1850–1927). Highly symbolic in its imagery and superbly executed, the tapestry is one of the most significant works of textiles in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Above text is from The beauty of life’: Morris & Co. by Rebecca Evans Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, Radical Textiles catalogue, 2024, pg. 52