SAN MARINO, CALIFORNIA.- The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens presents today “The Beauty of Life: William Morris and the Art of Design,” on view through April 4, 2004. William Morris’s place in the history of 19th-  century design are examined in this exhibition of almost 250 works drawn from The Huntington’s extensive Arts and Crafts holdings, which include the largest collection of William Morris materials outside of the United Kingdom.  

Focusing particularly on the work of Morris’s decorative arts firm, Morris & Company, the exhibit features original designs for stained glass, wallpaper, textiles, embroidery, and tapestry, including a handwritten book of dye recipes. It also examines Morris’s printing venture, the Kelmscott Press, with a selection of designs for books and books published by the Press. One of the highlights of the show is a beautifully illuminated 10-panel stained glass window designed by Morris’s partner and lifelong friend Edward Burne-Jones, assembled in the gallery to stand 15 feet high. In addition to showcasing Morris and his partners’ genius for design, the exhibition explores Morris’s fashioning of new forms and styles based upon his passion for the art and culture of the past. After closing at The Huntington, the exhibition will travel to the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut (Oct. 14, 2004 - Jan. 2, 2005).  More   Boone Gallery. 

William Morris (1834-1896) was among the most creative artists Britain has ever produced. His accomplishments are extraordinary in their range and depth. He was a revolutionary interior designer and book printer, a staunch socialist, a famous and prolific poet, a weaver, embroiderer, dyer, calligrapher, translator, businessman, and architectural preservationist. He established the internationally successful firm Morris & Company, for which he mastered the design and production of stained glass, wallpaper, printed and woven textiles, carpet, and tapestry. The astonishing range and depth of his achievements make him a unique figure in the history of art and design. He expanded our definition of art by changing the way we look at and live with the everyday objects that surround us. Morris fashioned new forms and styles by delving deep into the art and culture of the past, building a modern art on medieval foundations. His artistic practices further led him to political activism and an idealistic vision of the future. Morris’s art, his ideals, and his lifework paved the way for generations of artists who followed him in his pursuit of what he called "the beauty of life." 

Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company, known to its members as "the Firm," was founded in 1861 in London by Morris and a coterie of likeminded artists and friends from Morris’s time as a student at Oxford. The group included founding co-partners Peter Paul Marshall and Charles Faulkner (1834-1892), the architect Philip Webb (1831-1915), and the artists Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), who were leading figures in the Pre-Raphaelite movement. When Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company began operation in 1861, they announced themselves as "Fine Art Workmen," ready to "undertake any species of decoration," which was a realization of Morris’s ideal of a collective of artists and craftsmen working towards the common goal of achieving an "earthly paradise." It was an unusual endeavor at the time for a group of artists to turn their attention to designing objects to decorate the home, and, in doing so, they helped elevate the decorative arts to the level of fine art. The Firm began modestly, offering decorative furnishings to churches and homes. One of its earliest commissions was the tile-panel illustrating the story of Cinderella, designed by Burne-Jones and probably painted by Lucy Faulkner (1839-1910), Charles Faulkner’s sister. The Firm continued to expand as it found commercial success with the innovative patterns for wallpaper and textiles for which Morris is now famous. In 1875, the original partnership dissolved, and the Firm was reorganized as Morris & Company under Morris’s sole direction. In the next decades, Morris & Company prospered both artistically and commercially, as its remarkable range of domestic and ecclesiastical furnishings and renowned craftsmanship made it a household name.  

Morris & Company made an important contribution to the development of church decoration in the nineteenth century. The Firm joined a number of companies competing to meet the demand for stained glass created by the mid-nineteenth-century boom in church-building inspired by the Gothic Revival and the Anglican High Church movement. The Firm’s earliest stained glass, such as the window of St. Mary Magdalene designed by Morris, was directly influenced by medieval examples and found favor with Gothic Revival architects. Over time, however, Morris rejected what he thought was the slavish imitation of the forms of medieval art by some Gothic Revivalists. This distaste perhaps manifested itself in the development of the Firm’s windows, which took place between the 1860s and the 1870s. The Firm’s windows shifted to a new aesthetic developed in the close collaboration between Burne-Jones and Morris. Their designs moved toward a more dynamic style which combined Burne-Jones’s pictorialism and Morris’s intricate pattern designs. Their unique windows brought about a revolution in the use of color and design in stained glass.  

For Morris, the idea of the beautiful house was at the center of both his art and philosophy. The passion he held for architecture and domestic spaces can be traced throughout his life, in his letters and writings and his work as a designer, as well as in his love for his own houses, Red House in Kent, the sixteenth-century Kelmscott Manor, and his London home, Kelmscott House. The wallpapers, textiles, carpets, tapestries, and furniture designed by the Firm were intended to create an integrated artistic interior and, in so doing, to transform domestic life into a deeply aesthetic experience. Morris wished "to revive a sense of beauty in home life, to restore the dignity of art to the ordinary household decoration." The intricate layering and intertwining of organic forms in Morris’s patterns for wallpapers, such as Jasmine, and textiles, such as his design for the printed textile Iris, are still instantly recognizable today. These revolutionary pattern designs were based on his study of native plants and of historic textiles, again demonstrating his abiding interest in making use of the past as inspiration for the present. In keeping with his idealization of the medieval period, he advocated simple, uncluttered interiors in contrast to the elaborate decoration them typical of most Victorian homes.  

Morris became renowned throughout his life as a writer and poet. He published several books of poetry, prose romances and translations of Norse and classical texts, and lectured widely on design and socialism. In the last decade of his life Morris added the profession of book printer to his already remarkable range of accomplishments. He founded the Kelmscott Press, named after his beloved home, to print books "with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty." For Morris, the book was an art object to be appreciated in the same way as a beautiful home or a painting. Established in premises a few doors away from Kelmscott House in London, the Press would issue forty-two books before Morris’s death. All aspects of the books were conceived by Morris, from the typography and ornamented initials and borders, such as his design for the title-page of The Story of the Glittering Plain, to the page layout, format, and bindings, and were printed on handmade paper on a hand-press. Morris’s book designs were a revolutionary departure from the standard issue of Victorian publishers.  

Many of Morris’s artistic activities involved reviving medieval crafts, such as manuscript illumination, dyeing, and tapestry weaving. He was steeped in classical and medieval legends and was deeply inspired by the history and mythology of Iceland, which would serve as a creative spark for his later translations of Icelandic texts and his own prose romances. His dismay at the contemporary defacement and destruction of medieval buildings made him a pioneering champion for historical preservation, and, in 1877, he launched the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. In his ambitions to preserve the past, he pointed towards an optimistic vision of the future. Morris’s idealization of a medieval model of life that integrated creativity and labor, art and work, spurred his forward-looking politics. The past was always a place of inspiration for Morris, whether he looked at the traditional techniques of dyeing fabric, documented in the book of dye recipes used at the Firm’s workshops, or at the structure of society. He became a committed socialist, joining the Democratic Federation and later founding the Socialist League and working tirelessly as a political activist. His embrace of socialism was a response to the new conditions of labor resulting from the industrialization of Britain. Yet Morris was not afraid of modern technology if it did not compromise his project of creating a beautiful life. In fact, a number of Morris & Company furnishings, such as carpets, were machine produced.  

Morris’s ideas lived on even after his death, not only in the work of his protégé John Henry Dearle (1860-1932), who took over as artistic director of the Firm and guided it almost until its end, but in that of countless other artists and designers who, for a century and a half, have looked to Morris for inspiration. His influence extended from the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late nineteenth century to the organic modernism of Frank Lloyd Wright in America and the stark functionalism of the Bauhaus in Europe. Morris once confessed his fear that the work of Morris & Company was "going to be of no influence on the future." His fears, clearly, were misplaced. Although the Firm closed its doors at the beginning of the Second World War, Morris’s various endeavors in stained glass, pattern-designing, and book printing, and his philosophies of art have endured in the visionary transformation of interior design to an art. In changing the way we look at our homes, Morris changed the way we look at the world. 

The exhibition is based upon The Huntington’s William Morris Collection, one of the outstanding repositories of Morris materials. In the early part of the twentieth century, Henry E. Huntington assembled a significant collection of manuscripts for Morris’s published writings and material related to the Kelmscott Press. In 1999, a major acquisition of material added the archive of designs in the possession of the Firm at its liquidation. The collection includes over one thousand designs and full-scale cartoons for stained glass, seminal archival documentation of the Firm’s business, hundreds of designs for wallpaper, printed and woven textiles, carpets, tapestry, and embroidery as well as over 100 of Morris’s figure drawings, by far the largest extant collection in the world. In addition to these materials are designs for and books published by the Kelmscott Press, several manuscripts of Morris’s writings, multiple editions of Morris’s published literary and socialist works, and letters. The Huntington is now one of the major centers for Morris study in the world. 

This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Anne and Jim Rothenberg & Frank and Toshie Mosher with additional funding from The Elsie de Wolfe Foundation.