James Collinson

William Holman Hunt

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

John Everett Millais

Ford Madox Brown

Edward Burne-Jones

Thomas Cooper Gotch

Arthur Hughes

John William Waterhouse

William Morris

group of young British painters who banded together in 1848 in reaction against what they conceived to be the unimaginative and artificial historical painting of the Royal Academy and who purportedly sought to express a newmoral seriousness and sincerity in their works. They were inspired by Italian art of the 14th and 15th centuries, and their adoption of the name Pre-Raphaelite expressed their admiration for what they saw as the direct and uncomplicated depiction of nature typical of Italian painting before the High Renaissance and, particularly, before the time of Raphael. Although the Brotherhood's active life lasted not quite five years, its influence on painting in Britain, and ultimately on the decorative arts and interior design, was profound.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848 by three Royal Academy students: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was a gifted poet as well as a painter, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, all under 25 years of age. The painter James Collinson, the painter and critic F.G. Stephens, the sculptor Thomas Woolner, and thecritic William Michael Rossetti (Dante Gabriel's brother) joined them by invitation. The painters William Dyce andFord Madox Brown, who acted in part as mentors to the younger men, came to adapt their own work to the Pre-Raphaelite style.

The Brotherhood immediately began to produce highly convincing and significant works. Their pictures of religious and medieval subjects strove to revive the deep religious feeling and naive, unadorned directness of 15th-century Florentine and Sienese painting. The style that Hunt and Millais evolved featured sharp and brilliant lighting, a clear atmosphere, and a near-photographic reproduction of minute details. They also frequently introduced a private poetic symbolism into their representations of biblical subjects and medieval literary themes. Rossetti's work differed from that of the others in its more arcane aesthetic and in the artist's general lack of interest in copying the precise appearance of objects in nature. Vitality and freshness of vision are the most admirable qualities of the seearly Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

Some of the founding members exhibited their first works anonymously, signing their paintings with the monogramPRB. When their identity and youth were discovered in 1850, their work was harshly criticized by the novelist Charles Dickens, among others, not only for its disregard of academic ideals of beauty but also for its apparent irreverence in treating religious themes with an uncompromising realism. Nevertheless, the leading art critic of the day, John Ruskin, stoutly defended Pre-Raphaelite art, and the members of the group were never without patrons.

By 1854 the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had gone their individual ways, but their style had a wide influence and gained many followers during the 1850s and early '60s. In the late 1850s Dante Gabriel Rossettibecame associated with the younger painters Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris and moved closer to a sensual and almost mystical romanticism. Millais, the most technically gifted painter of the group, went on to become an academic success. Hunt alone pursued the same style throughout most of his career and remained true to Pre-Raphaelite principles. Pre-Raphaelitism in its later stage is epitomized by the paintings of Burne-Jones, characterized by a jewel-toned palette, elegantly attenuated figures, and highlyimaginative subjects and settings.

Encyclopædia Britannica

Between 1825 and 1860, life in England underwent profound changes as a result of the Industrial Revolution. In a country soon to be transformed by coal and steel production and its peripheral side effects of poverty and pollution, the luminous, sharply focused paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites provided a form of escape. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848 by William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), andJohn Everett Millais (1829-96). They were later joined by others, including Ford Madox Brown (1821-93) andEdward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-98). They initially signed their works with the initials PRB, causing much controversy and scandal. The champion of the movement, however, was writer and critic John Ruskin (1819-1900). who. in addition to promoting the Gothic style, helped to reinforce the group's sense of moral commitment and social awareness. He envisaged art as a means of saving the human race and fulfilling the most important human aspirations. In contrast to the pretence and artifice of academic painting, Pre-Raphaelite art looked afresh at techniques used by artists before the time of Raphael. Studying nature in detail to rediscover its inner meaning, the Brotherhood sought to communicate with the forgotten sources of spirituality. However, the early purity of spirit was later lost.

born February 8, 1819, London, England 
died January 20, 1900, Coniston,Lancashire 

English critic of art, architecture, and society who was a gifted painter, a distinctive prose stylist, and an important example of the Victorian Sage, or Prophet: a writer of polemical prose who seeks to cause widespread cultural and social change.

Early life and influences

Ruskin was born into the commercial classes of the prosperous and powerful Britain of the years immediately following the Napoleonic Wars. His father, John James Ruskin, was a Scots wine merchant who had moved to London and made a fortune in the sherry trade. John Ruskin, an only child, was largely educated at home, where he was given a taste for art by his father's collecting of contemporary watercolours and a minute and comprehensive knowledge of the Bible by his piously Protestant mother.

This combination of the religious intensity of the Evangelical Revival and the artistic excitement of English Romantic painting laid the foundations of Ruskin's later views. In his formative years, painters such as J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, and John Sell Cotman were at the peak of their careers. At the same time religious writers and preachers such as Charles Simeon, John Keble, Thomas Arnold, and John Henry Newman were establishing the spiritual and ethical preoccupations that would characterize the reign of Queen Victoria. Ruskin's family background in the world of businesswas significant, too: it not only provided the means for his extensive travels to see paintings, buildings, and landscapesin Britain and continental Europe but also gave him an understanding of the newly rich, middle-class audience for which his books would be written.

Ruskin discovered the work of Turner through the illustrations to an edition of Samuel Rogers's poem Italy given him by a business partner of his father in 1833. By the mid-1830s he was publishing short pieces in both prose and verse in magazines, and in 1836 he was provoked into drafting a reply (unpublished) to an attack on Turner's painting by the art critic of Blackwood's Magazine. After five years at the University of Oxford, during which he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry but was prevented by ill health from sitting for an honours degree, Ruskin returned, in 1842, to his abandoned project of defending and explaining the late work of Turner.

Art criticism

In 1843 Ruskin published the first volume of Modern Painters, a book that would eventually consist of five volumes and occupy him for the next 17 years. His first purpose was to insist on the “truth” of the depiction of Nature in Turner's landscape paintings. Neoclassical critics had attacked the later work of Turner, with its proto-Impressionist concern for effects of light and atmosphere, for mimetic inaccuracy, and for a failure to represent the “general truth” that had been an essential criterion of painting in the age of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Drawing on his serious amateur interests in geology, botany, and meteorology, Ruskin made it his business to demonstrate in detail that Turner's work was everywhere based on a profound knowledge of the local and particular truths of natural form. One after another, Turner's “truth of tone,” “truth of colour,” “truth of space,” “truth of skies,” “truth of earth,” “truth of water,” and “truth of vegetation” were minutely considered, in a laborious project that would not be completed until the appearance of the fifth and final volume of Modern Painters in 1860.

This shift of concern from general to particular conceptions of truth was a key feature of Romantic thought, and Ruskin's first major achievement was thus to bring the assumptions of Romanticism to the practice of art criticism. By 1843 avant-garde painters had been working in this new spirit for several decades, but criticism and public understanding had lagged behind. More decisively than any previous writer, Ruskin brought 19th-century English painting and 19th-century English art criticism into sympathetic alignment. As he did so, he alerted readers to the fact that they had, in Turner, one of the greatest painters in the history of Western art alive and working among them in contemporary London, and, in the broader school of English landscape painting, a major modern art movement.

Ruskin did this in a prose style peculiarly well adapted to the discussion of the visual arts in an era when there was limited reproductive illustration and no easy access to well-stocked public art galleries. In these circumstances the critic was obliged to create in words an effective sensory and emotional substitute for visual experience. Working in the tradition of the Romantic poetic prose of Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey, though more immediately influenced by the descriptive writing of Sir Walter Scott, the rhetoric of the Bible, and the blank verse of William Wordsworth, Ruskin vividly evoked the effect on the human eye and sensibility both of Turner's paintings and of the actual landscapes that Turner and other artists had sought to represent.

In the process Ruskin introduced the newly wealthy commercial and professional classes of the English-speaking world to the possibility of enjoying and collecting art. Since most of them had been shaped by an austerely puritanical religious tradition, Ruskin knew that they would be suspicious of claims for painting that stressed its sensual or hedonic qualities. Instead, he defined painting as “a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.” What that language expressed, in Romantic landscape painting, was a Wordsworthian sense of a divine presence in Nature: a morally instructive natural theology in which God spoke through physical “types.” Conscious of the spiritual significance of the natural world, young painters should “go to Nature in all singleness of heart…having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.”

Three years later, in the second volume of Modern Painters (1846), Ruskin would specifically distinguish this strenuously ethical or Theoretic conception of art from the Aesthetic, un didactic, or art-for-art's-sake definition that would be its great rival in the second half of the 19th century. Despite his friendships with individual Aesthetes, Ruskin would remain the dominant spokesman for a morally and socially committed conception of art throughout his lifetime.
 

Art, architecture, and society

After the publication of the first volume of Modern Painters in 1843, Ruskin became aware of another avant-garde artistic movement: the critical rediscovery of the painting of the Gothic Middle Ages. He wrote about these Idealist painters (especially Giotto, Fra Angelico, and Benozzo Gozzoli) at the end of the second volume of Modern Painters,and he belatedly added an account of them to the third edition of the first volume in 1846. These medieval religious artists could provide, he believed, in a way in which the Dutch, French, and Italian painters of the 17th and 18th centuries could not, an inspiring model for the art of the “modern” age.

This medievalist enthusiasm was one reason that Ruskin was so ready to lend his support to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), a group of young English artists formed in 1848 to reject the Neoclassical assumptions of contemporary art schools. Ruskin published an enthusiastic pamphlet about the PRB (in which he misleadingly identified them as the natural heirs of Turner) in 1851, wrote letters to the Times in 1851 and 1854 to defend them from their critics, and recommended their work in his Edinburgh Lectures of 1853 (published 1854).

But medievalism was even more important in the field of architecture, where the Gothic Revival was as direct an expression of the new Romantic spirit as the landscape painting of Turner or Constable. Ruskin had been involved in a major Gothic Revival building project in 1844, when George Gilbert Scott redesigned Ruskin's parents' parish church, St. Giles's Camberwell. In 1848, newly married to Euphemia (Effie) Gray, Ruskin went on a honeymoon tour of the Gothic churches of northern France and began to write his first major book on buildings, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849). Conceived in the disturbing context of the European revolutions of 1848, the book lays down seven moral principles (or “Lamps”) to guide architectural practice, one of which, “The Lamp of Memory,” articulates the scrupulous respect for the original fabric of old buildings that would inspire William Morris and, through him, the conservation movement of the 20th century. In November Ruskin went abroad again, this time to Venice to research a more substantial book on architecture.

The Stones of Venice was published in three volumes, one in 1851 and two more in 1853. In part it is a laboriously researched history of Venetian architecture, based on long months of direct study of the original buildings, then in a condition of serious neglect and decay. But it is also a book of moral and social polemic with the imaginative structure of a Miltonic or Words worthian sublime epic. Ruskin's narrative charts the fall of Venice from its medieval Eden, through the impiety and arrogance (as Ruskin saw it) of the Renaissance,to its modern condition of political impotence and social frivolity. As such, the book is a distinguished late example of the political medievalism found in the work of William Cobbett, Robert Southey, Thomas Carlyle, and the Young England movement of the 1840s. Ruskin differs from these predecessors both in the poetic power of his prose and in his distinctive—and widely influential—insistence that art and architecture are, necessarily, the direct expression of the social conditions in which they were produced. Here, as elsewhere, the Aesthetic movement, with its view of art as a rebellious alternative to the social norm and its enthusiasm for Renaissance texts and artifacts, stands in direct contrast to Ruskin's Theoretic views.

The Stones of Venice was influential in other ways as well. Itscelebration of Italian Gothic encouraged the use of foreign models in English Gothic Revival architecture. By 1874 Ruskin would regret the extent to which architects had “dignified our banks and drapers' shops with Venetian tracery.” But, for good or ill, his writing played a key part in establishing the view that the architectural style of Venice, the great maritime trading nation of the medieval world, wasparticularly appropriate for buildings in modern Britain. The other enduring influence derived, more subtly, from a single chapter in the second volume, “The Nature of Gothic.” There Ruskin identified “imperfection” as an essential feature of Gothic art, contrasting it with the mechanical regularity of Neoclassical buildings and modern mass production. Gothic architecture, he believed, allowed a significant degree of creative freedom and artistic fulfillment to the individual workman. We could not, and should not, take pleasure in an object that had not itself been made with pleasure. In this proposition lay the roots both of Ruskin's own quarrel with industrial capitalism and of the Arts and Crafts movement of the later 19th century.

Cultural criticism

Turner died in 1851. Ruskin's marriage was dissolved, on grounds of nonconsummation, in 1854, leaving the former Effie Gray free to marry the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. Ruskin withdrew somewhat from society. He traveled extensively in Europe and, from 1856 to 1858, took on a considerable body of administrative work as the chief artistic executor of Turner's estate. He contributed both financially and physically to the construction of a major Gothic Revival building: Benjamin Woodward's Oxford University Museum. In 1856 he published the third and fourth volumes of Modern Painters, with their penetrating inquiry into the reasons for the predominance of landscape painting in 19th-century art and their invention of the important critical term “pathetic fallacy.” His annual Academy Notes (a series of pamphlets issued by an English publisher from 1855 to 1859) sustained his reputation as a persuasive commentator on contemporary painting. But by 1858 Ruskin was beginning to move on from the specialist criticism of art and architecture to a wider concern with the cultural condition of his age. His growing friendship with the historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle contributed to this process. Like Carlyle, Ruskin began to adopt the “prophetic” stance, familiar from the Bible, of a voice crying from the wilderness and seeking to call a lapsed people back into the paths of righteousness.

This marginal role as a disenchanted outsider both legitimized and, to an extent, required a ferocity and oddness that would be conspicuous features of Ruskin's later career. In 1858 Ruskin lectured on “The Work of Iron in Nature, Art and Policy” (published in The Two Paths, 1859), a text in which both the radical-conservative temper and the symbolic method of his later cultural criticism are clearly established. Beginning as an art critic, Ruskin contrasts the exquisite sculptured iron grilles of medieval Verona with the mass-produced metal security railings with which modern citizens protect their houses. The artistic contrast is, of course, also a social contrast, and Ruskin goes rapidly beyond this to a symbolic assertion of the “iron” values involved in his definition of the just society. By wearing the fetters of a benignly neofeudalist social order, men and women, Ruskin believed, might lead lives of greater aesthetic fulfillment, in an environment less degraded by industrial pollution.

These values are persistently restated in Ruskin's writings of the 1860s, sometimes in surprising ways. Unto This Last and Munera Pulveris (1862 and 1872 as books, though published in magazines in 1860 and 1862–63) are attacks on the classical economics of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. Neither book makes any significant technical contribution to the study of economics (though Ruskin thought otherwise); both memorably express Ruskin's moral outrage at the extent to which the materialist and utilitarian ethical assumptions implicit in this new technique for understandinghuman behaviour had come to be accepted as normative. Sesame and Lilies (1865) would become notorious in the late20th century as a stock example of Victorian male chauvinism. In fact, Ruskin was using the conventional construction of the feminine, as pacific, altruistic, and uncompetitive, to articulate yet another symbolic assertion of his anticapitalist social model. The Crown of Wild Olive (1866, enlarged in 1873) collects some of the best specimens of Ruskin's Carlylean manner, notably the lecture “Traffic” of 1864, which memorably draws its audience's attention to the hypocrisy manifested by their choice of Gothic architecture for their churches but Neoclassical designs for their homes.

The dogmatic Protestantism of Ruskin's childhood had been partially abandoned in 1858, after an “unconversion” experience in Turin. Ten years later, in a moving lecture on “The Mystery of Life and Its Arts,” Ruskin reflected on his returning sense of the spiritual and transcendent. In The Queen of the Air (1869) he attempted to express his old concept of a divine power in Nature in new terms calculated for an age in which assent to the Christian faith was no longer automatic or universal. Through an account of the Greek myth of Athena, Ruskin sought to suggest an enduring human need for—and implicit recognition of—the supernatural authority on which the moral stresses of his artistic, political, and cultural views depend.

His father's death in 1864 had left Ruskin a wealthy man. He used his wealth, in part, to promote idealistic social causes, notably the Guild of St. George, a pastoral community first planned in 1871 and formally constituted seven years later. From 1866 to 1875 he was unhappily in love with a woman 30years his junior, Rose La Touche, whose physical and mental deterioration caused him acute distress. During these years he began, himself, to show signs of serious psychological illness. In 1871 he bought Brantwood, a house in the English Lake District (now a museum of his work) and lived there for the rest of his life.

Ruskin's appointment as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in 1870 was a welcome encouragement at a troubled stage of his career, and in the following year he launched Fors Clavigera, a one-man monthly magazine in which, from 1871 to 1878 and 1880 to 1884 he developed his idiosyncratic cultural theories. Like his successive series of Oxford lectures (1870–79 and 1883–84), Fors is an unpredictable mixture of striking insights, powerful rhetoric, self-indulgence, bigotry, and occasional incoherence. As a by-product of the Fors project, however, Ruskin wrote his lastmajor work: his autobiography, Praeterita (1885–89). Unfinished, shamelessly partial (it omits, for example, all mention of his marriage), and chronologically untrustworthy, it provides a subtle and memorable history of the growth of Ruskin's distinctive sensibility.
 

Assessment

In November 1878 the painter James McNeill Whistler's action for libel against Ruskin—brought after Ruskin's attack on the impressionist manner of a Whistler Nocturne—came totrial. The trial made the conflict between Ruskin's moral viewof art and Whistler's Aestheticism a matter of wide public interest. Whistler, awarded only a farthing's damages and no costs, was driven into bankruptcy. Ruskin suffered no financial ill effects, but his reputation as an art critic was seriously harmed. After this date there was a growing tendency to see him as an enemy of modern art: blinkered, eccentric, and out-of-date.

Modernist artists and critics rejected Ruskin. His stress on the moral, social, and spiritual purposes of art and his Naturalist theory of visual representation were unpopular in the era of Impressionism, Cubism, and Dada. Gothic Revival buildings became deeply unfashionable; the architecture critic Geoffrey Scott, in 1914, would dismiss Ruskin's architectural theory as “The Ethical Fallacy.”

Since then, Ruskin has gradually been rediscovered. His formative importance as a thinker about ecology, about the conservation of buildings and environments, about Romanticpainting, about art education, and about the human cost of the mechanization of work became steadily more obvious. The outstanding quality of his own drawings and watercolours (modestly treated in his lifetime as working notes or amateur sketches) was increasingly acknowledged, as was his role as a stimulus to the flowering of British painting, architecture, and decorative art in the second half of the 19th century.

Above all, Ruskin was rediscovered as a great writer of English prose. Frequently self-contradictory, hectoringly moralistic, and insufficiently informed, Ruskin was nonetheless gifted with exceptional powers of perception and expression. These are the gifts that the poet Matthew Arnold acknowledged when he spoke of “the genius, the feeling, the temperament” of the descriptive writing in the fourth volume of Modern Painters. This unusual capacity to see things and to say what he saw makes Ruskin's work not just an important episode in the history of taste but also an enduring and distinctive part of English literature.

Nicholas Shrimpton 

Encyclopædia Britannica

born August 21, 1861, Fall River,Massachusetts, U.S. 
died February 4, 1916, Boston 

American artist remembered for her highly symbolic, dreamlike paintings.

Macomber studied drawing with a local artist from about 1880 to 1883, then at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for a year, until ill health cut short her studies. After her recovery she studied briefly with Frank Duveneck and then opened a studio in Boston. In 1889 her painting Ruth was exhibited in the National Academy of Design show in New York City. Over the next 13 years she exhibited 25 more paintings at the National Academy and was a frequent exhibitor at other major museums and galleries.

Macomber's symbolic, allegorical, and decorative panels, revealing the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, were widely admired by her contemporaries. Among her more celebrated works are Love Awakening Memory (1892), Love's Lament (1893), St. Catherine (1897), The Hour Glass (1900), The LaceJabot (1900; a self-portrait), Night and Her Daughter Sleep (1903), and Memory Comforting Sorrow (1905). In the later years of her career she also devoted much time to portraiture.

Arts and Crafts Movement

English aesthetic movement of the second half of the 19th century that represented the beginning of a new appreciation of the decorative arts throughout Europe. By 1860 a few people had become profoundly disturbed by the level to which style, craftsmanship, and public taste had sunk in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and its mass-produced and banal decorative arts. Among them was the English reformer, poet, and designer William Morris, who, in 1861, founded a firm of interior decorators and manufacturers dedicated to recapturing the spirit and quality of medieval craftsmanship. Morris and his associates (among them the architect Philip Webb and the painters Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones) produced handcrafted metalwork, jewelry, wallpaper, textiles, furniture, and books. To this date many of their designs are copied by designers and furniture manufacturers.

By the 1880s Morris' efforts had widened the appeal of the Arts and Crafts Movement to a new generation. In 1882 the English architect and designer Arthur H. Mackmurdo helped organize the Century Guild for craftsmen, one of several such groups established about this time. These men revived the art of hand printing and championed the idea that there was no meaning fuldifference between the fine and decorative arts. Many converts, both from professional artists' ranks and from among the intellectual class as a whole, helped spread the ideas of the movement.

The main controversy raised by the movement—as no one ever denied the quality or aesthetic appeal of the work produced—was its practicality in the modern world. The progressives claimed that the movement was trying to turn back the clock and that it could not be done, that the Arts and Crafts Movement could not be taken as practical in mass urban and industrialized society. On the other hand, a reviewer who criticized an 1893 exhibition as “the work of a few for the few” also realized that it represented a graphic protest against design as “a marketable affair, controlled by the salesmen and the advertiser, and at the mercy of every passing fashion.”

In the 1890s approval of the Arts and Crafts Movement widened, and the movement became diffused and less specifically identified with a small group of people. Its ideas spread to other countries and became identified with the growing international interest in design, specifically with Art Nouveau.

born March 24, 1834, Walthamstow, near London 
died Oct. 3, 1896, Hammersmith, near London 

English designer, craftsman, poet, and early Socialist, whose designs for furniture, fabrics, stained glass, wallpaper, and other decorative products generated the Arts and Crafts Movement in England and revolutionized Victorian taste.

Education and early career.

Morris was born in an Essex village on the southern edge of Epping Forest, a member of a large and well-to-do family. From his preparatory school, he went at the age of 13 to Marlborough College. A schoolfellow describes him at this time as “a thick-set, strong-looking boy, with a high colour and black curly hair, good-natured and kind, but with a fearfultemper.” At Marlborough, Morris said that he learned “next to nothing . . . for indeed next to nothing was taught.” As in later life, he learned only what he wanted to learn.

In 1853 Morris went to Exeter College at Oxford, where he met Edward Jones (later the painter and designer Burne-Jones), who was to become his lifelong friend. Both Morris and Jones became deeply affected by the High Church (Anglo-Catholic) movement of the Church of England, and it was assumed that they would become clergymen. Nevertheless, it was the writings of John Ruskin on the social and moral basis of architecture (particularly the chapter “On the Nature of Gothic” in The Stones of Venice) that came to Morris “with the force of a revelation.” After taking his degree in 1856, he entered the Oxford office of the Gothic Revivalist architect G.E. Street. In the same year he financed the first 12 monthly issues of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, where many of those poems appeared that, two years later, were reprinted in his remarkable first published work, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems.

Visits with Street and Burne-Jones to Belgium and northern France, where he first saw the 15th-century paintings of Hans Memling and the Van Eyck brothers and the cathedrals of Amiens, Chartres, and Rouen, confirmed Morris in his love of medieval art. It was at this time that he came under the powerful influence of the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who persuaded him to give up architecture for painting and enrolled him among the band of friends who were decorating the walls of the Oxford Union with scenes from Arthurian legend based on Le Morte Darthur by the 15th-centuryEnglish writer Sir Thomas Malory. Only one easel painting by Morris survives: “La Belle Iseult,” or “Queen Guenevere” (Tate Gallery, London). His model was Jane Burden, the beautiful, enigmatic daughter of an Oxford groom. He married her in 1859, but the marriage was to prove a source of unhappiness to both. 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.” 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.” From 1856 to 1859 Morris shared a studio with Burne-Jones in Red Lion Square, London, for which he designed, according to Rossetti, “some intensely medieval furniture.”

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). It was during the furnishing and decorating of this house by Morris and his friends that the idea came to them of founding an association of “fine art workmen,” whichin April 1861 became the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company with premises in Red Lion Square. The other members of the firm were Ford Madox Brown, D.G. Rossetti, Webb, and Burne-Jones. At the International Exhibition of 1862 at South Kensington they exhibited stained glass, furniture, and embroideries. This led to commissions to decorate the new churches then being built by G.F. Bodley, notably St. Martin's-on-the-Hill at Scarborough. The apogee of the firm's decorative work is the magnificent series of stained-glass windows designed during the next decade by Burne-Jones for Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge, the roof being painted by Morris and Webb. The designs for these windows came to Morris uncoloured, and it was he who chose the colours and put in the lead lines. He also designed many other windows himself, for both domestic and ecclesiastical use.

Two daughters, Jenny and May, were born in 1861 and 1862, and altogether the five years spent at Red House were the happiest of Morris' life. After a serious attack of rheumatic fever, brought on by overwork, he moved in 1865 to Bloomsbury in London. The greater part of his new house wasgiven over to the firm's workshops—an arrangement that, combined with her husband's boisterous manners and Rossetti's infatuation with her, reduced Jane to a state of neurotic invalidism. Morris' first wallpaper designs, “Trellis,” “Daisy,” and “Fruit,” or “Pomegranate,” belong to 1862–64; he did not arrive at his mature style until 10 years later, with the “Jasmine” and “Marigold” papers.

Iceland and Socialism.

As a poet, he first achieved fame and success with the romantic narrative The Life and Death of Jason (1867). In the 20th century, however, Jason, with its lax, easily flowing couplets, appears diffuse to the point of tenuity. All painful emotion is carefully avoided or smothered in prettiness, as italso is in his next work, in the seemingly endless stories of The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), a series of narrative poems based on classical and medieval sources. The best parts of The Earthly Paradise are the introductory poems on the months, in which Morris reveals his personal unhappiness. A sterner spirit informs his principal poetic achievement, the epic Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876), written after a prolonged study of the sagas (medieval prose narratives) read by Morris in the original Old Norse. The exquisitely illuminated Book of Verse, telling once more of hopeless love and dedicated to Georgiana Burne-Jones, belongs to 1870.

In 1871 Morris and Rossetti took the Elizabethan manor house of Kelmscott in Oxfordshire. In the same year Morris paid his first visit to Iceland, and the journal he kept of his travels contains some of his most vigorous descriptive writing. He returned to Iceland in 1873. The joint tenancy of Kelmscott, however, was never a success, and, after the finalbreakdown of his health in 1874, Rossetti left the house for good, to Morris' great relief. At the same time, the firm was reorganized under his sole proprietorship as Morris & Company. In 1875 Morris began his revolutionary experiments with vegetable dyes, which, after the removal in 1881 of the firm to larger premises at Merton Abbey in Surrey, resulted in their finest printed and woven fabrics, carpets, and tapestries. In 1877 Morris gave his first public lecture, “The Decorative Arts” (later called “The Lesser Arts”), and his first collection of lectures, Hopes and Fears for Art, appeared in 1882. In 1877 he also founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in an attempt to combat the drastic methods of restoration then being carried out on the cathedrals and parish churches of Great Britain.

The Morris family moved into Kelmscott House (named after their country house in Oxfordshire), at Hammersmith, in 1878. Five years later Morris joined Henry Mayers Hyndman's Democratic (later Social Democratic) Federation and began his tireless tours of industrial areas to spread the gospel of Socialism. But he was considerately treated by the authorities, even when leading a banned demonstration to London's Trafalgar Square on “Bloody Sunday” (Nov. 13, 1887), when the police, supported by troops, cleared the square of demonstrators. On this occasion he marched with the playwright George Bernard Shaw at his side. But by this time Morris had quarrelled with the autocratic Hyndman Federation and formed the Socialist League, with its own publication, The Commonweal, in which his two finest romances, A Dream of John Ball (1886–87) and News from Nowhere (1890), an idyllic vision of a Socialist rural utopia, appeared. Subsequently, he founded the Hammersmith Socialist Society, which held weekly lectures in the coach house next door to Kelmscott House as well as open-air meetings in different parts of London.
 

The Kelmscott Press.

The Kelmscott Press was started in 1891, with the printer andtype designer Emery Walker as typographical adviser, and between that year and 1898 produced 53 titles in 66 volumes. Morris designed three type styles for his press: Golden type, modelled on that of Nicolas Jenson, the 15th-century French printer; Troy type, a gothic font on the model of the early German printers of the 15th century; and Chaucer type, a smaller variant of Troy, in which The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer was printed during the last years of his life. One of the greatest examples of the art of the printed book, Chaucer is the most highly decorated of the Kelmscott publications. Most of the Kelmscott books were plain and simple, for Morris observed that 15th-century books were “always beautiful by force of the mere typography.”

Death and assessment.

A sea voyage to Norway in the summer of 1896 failed to revive Morris' flagging energies, and he died that autumn after returning home, worn out by the multiplicity of his activities. He was buried at Kelmscott beneath a simple gravestone designed by Philip Webb.

Morris is now regarded as one of the great men of the 19th century, though he turned away from what he called “the dullsqualor of civilization” to romance, myth, and epic. Followinghis contemporary the art critic John Ruskin, Morris defined beauty in art as the result of man's pleasure in his work and asked, “Unless people care about carrying on their business without making the world hideous, how can they care about Art?” To Morris, art included the whole man-made environment.

In his own time William Morris was most widely known as the author of The Earthly Paradise and for his designs for wallpapers, textiles, and carpets. Since the mid-20th century it is as a designer and craftsman, rather than as poet or politician, that Morris is valued most, though future generations may esteem him more as a social and moral critic, a pioneer of the society of equality.

Philip Prichard Henderson 

Encyclopædia Britannica

(b Hadleigh, Suffolk, 17 Dec 1825; d London, 7 Oct 1892). 

English sculptor and poet. He ranks with John Henry Foley as the leading sculptor of mid-Victorian England. He trained with William Behnes and in 1842 enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy, London. In 1844 he exhibited at Westminster Hall, London, a life-size plaster group, the Death of Boadicea (destr.), in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain sculptural commissions for the Houses of Parliament. His earliest important surviving work is the statuette of Puck (plaster, 1845–7; C. G. Woolner priv. col.), which was admired by William Holman Hunt and helped to secure Woolner’s admission in 1848 to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The work’s Shakespearean theme and lifelike execution, stressing Puck’s humorous malice rather than traditional ideal beauty, made it highly appealing. Although eclipsed by Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Woolner was an important figure in the Brotherhood. He contributed poetry to its journal, The Germ (1850), and his work was committed to truthfulness to nature more consistently than that of any other Pre-Raphaelite, except for Hunt. This is evident in Woolner’s monument to William Wordsworth (marble, 1851; St Oswald, Grasmere, Cumbria). This relief portrait, which conveys both the poet’s physiognomy and his intellect, is flanked by botanically faithful renditions of flowers, emphasizing Wordsworth’s doctrine that in Woolner’s words, ‘common things can be made equally suggestive and instructive with the most exalted subjects’.

Thomas Woolner
Bust of Arthur Hugh Clough



Thomas Woolner
Bust of Frederick Temple



Thomas Woolner
Reliefs illustrating scenes from the Iliad, for Gladstone memorial bust 1865-66

Thomas Woolner
Eros and Euphrosyne 

 

Thomas Woolner
Virgilia Bewailing the Banishment of Coriolanus

(b Mansfield, 9 May 1825; d London, 24 Jan 1881). 

English painter. He was the son of a Nottinghamshire bookseller. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools, London, where he was a fellow student of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. Although quiet and unobtrusive, he caught the attention of critics when he exhibited the Charity Boy’s Début at the Royal Academy in 1847 (sold London, Christie’s, 26 Oct 1979, lot 256). The painting was praised for its truthfulness and use of minute detail. It was admired by Rossetti, who sought out Collinson and befriended him. The following year saw the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), which Rossetti invited Collinson to join. Around this date Collinson renounced Catholicism and became engaged to Christina Rossetti; possibly this influenced the other members of the PRB in favour of his election to their number. However, he was never a leading member of the Brotherhood.