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Strawberry Thief: The Print Morris Refused to Make the Cheap Way
Strawberry Thief is the William Morris pattern most people can name without knowing they can name it: thrushes stealing fruit from a kitchen garden, printed in 1883 and still turning up on cushions, tote bags and, these days, framed prints. What gets left out of the story is how it was made, and why that method was never going to make Morris money. A garden, and the birds raiding it The design shows thrushes taking fruit from a kitchen garden, based on birds William Morris watched at Kelmscott Manor, the Oxfordshire house he had rented since 1871. He named the pattern after what the birds were doing. It was first printed as a textile in 1883, by which point Morris & Co. had been running for over two decades and had moved well beyond the furniture and stained glass that had originally funded it. Why Morris did the dyeing himself By 1883, Morris had already spent years teaching himself the chemistry behind the colours in his textiles. In the mid-1870s he set up a small dye house at Queen Square in London and, for a period, dyeing took up much of his working life. This was not standard practice for a Victorian manufacturer. Most textile firms bought their dyeing in from specialists and moved on. Morris wanted to control the process himself, which meant learning it from scratch rather than delegating it. By the time Strawberry Thief went into production, that hands-on approach to colour and printing was carried out at Merton Abbey, the workshops Morris & Co. had set up south of London in 1881. The firm made a point of doing the slow version of things: hand block printing rather than mechanised rollers, dyes worked out in-house rather than bought as a finished formula. It is one reason the pattern still reads as dense and layered rather than flat. The economics never worked None of this was cheap. Morris rejected the factory methods that had made Victorian textiles affordable for most households, on the grounds that machine production degraded both the object and the person making it. The trade-off was cost: hand dyeing and hand block printing could never compete on price with a mechanised roller press, and Morris & Co.'s customers were, by necessity, wealthier than the "ordinary people" Morris said he wanted to furnish. He was open about the contradiction. By most accounts, Morris proved a better craftsman than an economist: the firm's products stayed a luxury for people who could afford handmade goods, while the factory-made alternatives he despised kept getting cheaper and more widely bought. A pattern like Strawberry Thief, worked out under his own dyeing regime at Merton Abbey rather than farmed out to a cheaper contractor, was a direct product of that choice. It survived not because it made commercial sense at the time, but because the design itself was strong enough to outlast the balance sheet that produced it. What is actually for sale now Morris's original textiles and wallpapers are in museum collections, and reissued versions of the pattern (as fabric, as wallpaper) are sold by companies with a licence to the archive. What we sell in our Strawberry Thief collection is different again: a framed fine art print of the public-domain design, made to order in the UK, sized for a wall rather than a roll of wallpaper or a metre of curtain fabric. It is one pattern among the wider William Morris collection, which covers his other repeat designs from the same decades. If you want to see Morris's actual textiles and dye work rather than a reproduction, our guide to where to see William Morris in the UK lists the collections that hold them. Strawberry Thief was never going to be an inexpensive pattern to produce. That it exists at all, in the form Morris intended, tells you something about which of his two goals (dignified handmade objects, and objects most people could afford) he was actually willing to compromise on.
Géricault Painted the Raft of the Medusa From a Government Cover-Up
On 2 July 1816, the French frigate Medusa ran aground on the Bank of Arguin, off the coast of present-day Mauritania. The ship had been carrying troops, settlers, and supplies to re-establish the French colony at Saint-Louis in Senegal, returned to France by the British under the terms of the post-Napoleonic settlement. The captain, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, had been appointed for political reasons by the restored Bourbon government despite having spent twenty years out of service. He had run aground because he had refused to listen to his more experienced officers. There were not enough lifeboats. Six lifeboats carried 250 officers, sailors, and first-class passengers safely to shore. The remaining 147 people were placed on an improvised raft, twenty metres long and seven metres wide, constructed from the ship's masts and yards lashed together. The raft was to be towed to shore behind the lifeboats. Several kilometres from the wreck, the lifeboat crews cut the towlines and left the raft to drift. The Thirteen Days The raft drifted for thirteen days in the open Atlantic. The 147 people on board had a small supply of biscuits, several barrels of wine, and no fresh water. By the second night they had begun to fight; by the fourth night they had begun to die. The strong attacked the weak. The wine was drunk. The biscuits ran out. By the fifth day, some of the survivors had begun to eat the bodies of the dead. On the thirteenth day, the brig Argus, which had been sent to look for them, sighted the raft by accident. Fifteen of the original 147 were still alive. Five of those died within days of rescue. The final ten survivors gave depositions on their return to France. The Cover-Up The Bourbon government had every reason to suppress the story. Chaumareys was a Bourbon appointee. The decision to cut the towlines had been made by Bourbon-appointed officers. The whole episode was an indictment of the restored monarchy's policy of placing political loyalists rather than competent officers in command of military vessels. Two survivors, Henri Savigny (the ship's surgeon) and Alexandre Corréard (an engineer), wrote a detailed published account of the disaster. The account appeared in November 1817, titled Naufrage de la frégate la Méduse. It was a sensation. The book was attacked by royalist journals, defended by liberal ones, and circulated rapidly through Parisian society. Both authors were dismissed from government service shortly after publication. Théodore Géricault, Portrait of a Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy (one of the Insane Portraits series), c. 1822. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. Géricault painted ten psychiatric patients at the Salpêtrière in the years after The Raft. Géricault Théodore Géricault was twenty-six in 1817 when he read the Savigny and Corréard book. He was the son of a wealthy Norman family, trained as a painter under Carle Vernet and Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, and was already known for several large equestrian paintings he had shown at the 1812 and 1814 Salons. He had recently returned from a year in Italy, where he had studied Caravaggio's Roman religious paintings and the late Michelangelo Sistine ceiling. Géricault was a liberal and was furious about the Medusa cover-up. He decided to paint the raft for the 1819 Salon, in a deliberately massive scale that would make the picture impossible to ignore. The Method The painting that resulted is 491 by 716 centimetres. It is the largest painting Géricault ever made and one of the largest paintings of the nineteenth century. The composition shows the moment of rescue: the survivors on the raft sighting the Argus on the horizon, the figures arranged in a rising pyramid from the dead at the front to the figure waving a cloth at the back. Géricault prepared the picture obsessively. He shaved his head so that he would not be distracted by his own appearance and would have to stay in the studio. He had a carpenter build a scale model of the raft. He read every account of the disaster he could find. He visited the morgue at the Hôpital Beaujon to study the colour and decay of corpses. He bought severed limbs from the morgue and arranged them in his studio to study at length. He interviewed Savigny and Corréard at length. Corréard appears in the final painting: he is the figure in the centre-left, standing with his arm outstretched, pointing toward the horizon where the Argus has been sighted. Géricault hired the surgeon Savigny as a technical consultant. The carpenter who built the raft model also built the studio model of the rescue. What the Painting Shows The Raft was hung at the 1819 Salon in October 1819. The reception was sharply divided. Liberal critics praised it as a political statement. Royalist critics attacked its size and its colouring. The painter Antoine-Jean Gros, an older neoclassicist whose own work had once held the avant-garde position Géricault now occupied, said the painting was "the corpses of the Bourbons painted by a former Bonapartist." The picture did not sell at the Salon. Géricault had hoped it would be purchased by the government for the Louvre. It was not. He exhibited it privately in London in 1820, where it drew large paying audiences and made him roughly the equivalent of £20,000 in modern money over a six-month exhibition run. The painting was eventually acquired by the Louvre in 1824, the year of Géricault's death, for a price that was lower than what he had been paid in private London ticket sales. It has hung there since. The Short Career Géricault produced about 300 paintings and several thousand drawings in his lifetime. He died in January 1824, aged thirty-two, from complications of a riding accident. The Raft was the only major political painting of his career. After it, he had moved to a smaller scale: a series of psychiatric patient portraits made at the Salpêtrière in 1821 to 1822 (ten paintings, of which five survive), several lithograph series, and the equestrian studies that had always been his side interest. The early death has been a kind of biographical asset to his reputation. Géricault is the founding example of the doomed Romantic painter: huge ambition, formal innovation, political engagement, dead at thirty-two. The model carried through Delacroix (who modelled for one of the figures in The Raft), through Manet a generation later, through Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec, and into the modern myth of the painter who burns hot and brief. What the Raft Did The Raft of the Medusa was the first large-scale modern history painting that took its subject from contemporary news rather than from classical or biblical history. The convention of nineteenth-century history painting had been to ennoble the present by allegorising it: to paint a Napoleonic victory, but with the figures dressed in Roman costume. Géricault refused the convention. He painted a contemporary disaster as a contemporary disaster, with the survivors named, the captain identifiable, the political failure visible. The painting changed what large-scale public painting could be. Within a generation, Delacroix would paint the 1830 Revolution (Liberty Leading the People, 1830) on a similar scale and with a similar refusal of allegorical distancing. Manet would paint the execution of Maximilian in 1867 on the same Raft-scaled canvas. The line of large modern history paintings of the next century has its origin in the wall of the 1819 Salon. The Raft also stayed politically useful. It became a reference point in French left-wing politics through the nineteenth century, an image that liberal papers would invoke whenever a Bourbon (later, a Napoleonic, later, a Bonapartist) regime committed an avoidable disaster. The painting did the political work Géricault had built it to do. The Bourbon regime fell in 1830. Chaumareys, the captain who had grounded the Medusa, was court-martialled and given three years in prison: a sentence that Géricault's painting had helped make politically necessary.
Matisse Painted a Window in 1905 and Critics Called Him a Wild Beast
The 1905 Salon d'Automne opened in Paris on 18 October at the Grand Palais. Henri Matisse, then thirty-five, was hanging four paintings in Room VII, including Open Window, Collioure and Woman with a Hat. André Derain, ten years younger and Matisse's recent collaborator, had several canvases on the same wall. In the centre of the room stood a small Donatello-style Renaissance bronze. The critic Louis Vauxcelles wrote about Room VII for the Gil Blas newspaper. He pointed at the contrast between the conventional bronze and the surrounding paintings and produced the phrase that named a movement: "Donatello au milieu des fauves" — Donatello in a den of wild beasts. The word fauves stuck. Matisse, Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, Charles Camoin, and Othon Friesz became Les Fauves. What Was On the Wall The Fauve paintings of 1905 used colour the way no European painting had used it since the medieval illuminators. Pure, unblended pigment straight from the tube. Cadmium red next to viridian. Cobalt blue against zinc yellow. No earth tones, no subtle modelling, no atmospheric grey. The colour was applied in broad flat areas, often outlined in another colour, often departing entirely from the colour of the actual subject. Open Window, Collioure shows the view from Matisse's hotel room window in the southern French fishing village of Collioure, where he had spent the summer of 1905 with Derain. A small balcony, three flower pots, and a window-frame in the foreground. A small harbour beyond, with three boats. The sky and the sea are painted in pink, peach, blue-green, and salmon. The walls of the balcony are red and pink. The shutters are green and red. The painting was not naturalistic and was not trying to be. Matisse had begun, in summer 1904, working on a series of pictures that pushed colour past Impressionist observation toward what he called "expression through colour." Open Window was the fullest statement of this practice he had yet made. The colour did the work. The Critics Vauxcelles's wild-beast review was relatively mild. Other critics were not. The reviewer for L'Illustration wrote that Woman with a Hat was "the most unpleasant thing in the entire Salon." Charles Morice, an established Symbolist critic, wrote about Matisse's paintings as "the products of an apparent disorder of the cerebral functions." The pictures were also defended. Gertrude and Leo Stein, the American collectors who had just begun acquiring contemporary French painting, bought Woman with a Hat for 500 francs after watching the painting be mocked in front of them by other Salon visitors. The Russian textile-magnate collector Sergei Shchukin began buying Matisse the following year and would acquire 37 Matisse paintings over the next decade. Henri Matisse, Le Bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life), 1905-06. Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. The large summary picture Matisse painted directly after the 1905 Salon controversy. The Joy of Life In autumn 1905, immediately after the Salon, Matisse began the largest painting of his career to date: Le Bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life), 175 by 241 centimetres, oil on canvas. The picture shows a sunlit meadow with figures relaxing in various states of nudity: dancing, lying down, embracing. The colours are even more saturated than the Fauve room of 1905. The drawing is simplified to long flowing contour lines. Bonheur was finished by spring 1906 and shown at the 1906 Salon des Indépendants. It was the public statement of what Matisse thought Fauvism could do at full scale. The painting was attacked again, but this time Matisse had a defender at hand: Leo and Gertrude Stein bought Bonheur for 1,000 francs and hung it in their Rue de Fleurus salon, where it became the most-discussed contemporary painting in Paris for the next several years. The Steins' salon was where the Fauve picture met the next generation. Picasso saw Bonheur there in spring 1906 and began working on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) partly in response. The competition between Matisse and Picasso that would define European painting for the next twenty years began at the Steins' apartment in 1906. Why Fauvism Lasted So Briefly Fauvism as a coherent movement existed from roughly 1905 to 1908. By the end of 1907, the group had begun to fragment. Derain shifted toward a darker, more structured manner influenced by Cézanne. Vlaminck moved similarly. Braque, who had begun working in a Fauve idiom in 1906, switched in 1908 to early Cubism alongside Picasso. Matisse himself kept developing what he had begun, but increasingly along his own lines. By 1909 he was producing paintings (Dance, The Conversation, The Music) that were Matissean rather than Fauvist. The collective movement had served its purpose. It had broken the hold of post-Impressionist atmospheric colour and opened up the possibility of using pigment for its own properties rather than as a vehicle for description. What the Window Argued The Open Window of 1905 was a small painting (55 by 46 centimetres) that did a large amount of historical work. It argued that European painting could continue without being bound to the colour conventions that Impressionism had developed and post-Impressionism had partly modified. The argument was made through the painting's structure. The view through the window is composed of horizontal bands of colour. Sea and sky take up most of the upper half of the picture; the balcony and pots occupy the lower half. Each band is a different colour, and the bands are separated by hard edges rather than the soft transitions Impressionist painters used. The colour does not describe what is being seen; the colour decides what the painting is. This shift, from colour as observation to colour as construction, is the foundation of all twentieth-century colour painting. Mondrian, Rothko, Newman, Kelly, Diebenkorn: each of them descends from the 1905 Salon room. The lineage runs through Matisse's late cut-outs of the 1940s and 1950s, which carried the original Fauve logic to its conclusion. What Happened to the Wild Beasts Vauxcelles's joke became a movement name within weeks. The painters he had called fauves accepted the label and used it. The Salon d'Automne of 1905 became, in retrospect, the foundational exhibition of twentieth-century French painting. Open Window, Collioure is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Woman with a Hat is in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Le Bonheur de vivre is at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. The four paintings Matisse hung in Room VII in October 1905 are now in major American museum collections, on display every day, drawing larger audiences than they ever drew in Paris. The painters of 1905 had been told they were monstrous. They turned out to be the first painters of the century.