At sixteen, William Morris refused to set foot in the Great Exhibition of 1851. The whole family had travelled to London for it, but Morris would not cross the threshold. Machine-made goods offended him on principle, even as a teenager. That stubbornness shaped everything he did for the next forty-five years.
Timeline
Biography
He went to Oxford to study theology and came out a designer. John Ruskin's writing did the damage, specifically a chapter called 'On the Nature of Gothic' from The Stones of Venice. Ruskin argued that the irregularities in medieval craft were evidence of human freedom, while the perfection of factory goods was evidence of human slavery. Morris took this literally. He abandoned the Church, dropped out of an architecture apprenticeship with G.E. Street, and fell in with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones instead.
In 1861, Morris started a firm. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co made stained glass, furniture, wallpaper, and textiles. Everything by hand. Rossetti and Burne-Jones contributed designs; Philip Webb built the buildings. The wallpapers became the thing people remembered. Morris produced over 600 designs in his lifetime, but Strawberry Thief and Willow Boughs are the ones that ended up on tea towels and tote bags a century later. He would have found that funny, or possibly infuriating.
He was also a poet, a translator of Icelandic sagas, a printer who cut his own typefaces, and a committed socialist who spent his later years lecturing factory workers about the dignity of labour. His only easel painting, La Belle Iseult, hangs in the Tate. He made it in 1858 and never tried again.
Notable Works
Artists You’ll See Alongside William Morris
These artists’ works appear in the same museum collections.
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