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William Morris (1834-1896) : Submission By: Sneha Periwal Roll No.: 23 Subject: Art and Design Sem: Ix Year: V
William Morris (1834-1896) : Submission By: Sneha Periwal Roll No.: 23 Subject: Art and Design Sem: Ix Year: V
(1834-1896)
SUBMISSION BY : SNEHA PERIWAL
ROLL NO. : 23
SUBJECT : ART AND DESIGN
SEM : IXTH YEAR: VTH
INTRODUCTION
• Born: March 24, 1834 - Walthamstow, England
• Died: October 3, 1896 - Hammersmith, England
• Movements and Styles: Arts and Crafts Movement, The Pre-
Raphaelites, Aesthetic Art.
• William Morris (1834-1896), one of the most versatile and influential
men of his age, was the last of the major English romantics and a
leading champion and promoter of revolutionary ideas as poet, critic,
artist, designer, manufacturer, and socialist.
• Training first as a priest and then as an architect before abandoning both
to realize his visions of medieval arcadia in the company of the Pre-
Raphaelites, he moved between artistic and literary media throughout
his life.
WILLIAM MORRIS
• William Morris is best known as the 19th century's most celebrated (1834-1896)
designer.
• He was a major contributor to the revival of traditional British textile arts
and methods of production.
EDUCATION
• During his lifetime, Morris produced items in a range of crafts, mainly those to do with furnishing, including over
600 designs for wall-paper, textiles, and embroideries, over 150 for stained glass windows, three typefaces, and
around 650 borders and ornamentations for the Kelmscott Press.
• In the field of textile design, Morris revived a number of dead techniques , and insisted on the use of good quality
raw materials, almost all natural dyes, and hand processing. He also observed the natural world first hand to gain a
basis for his designs, and insisted on learning the techniques of production prior to producing a design.
ARTS AND CRAFT MOVEMENT
William Morris is often seen as the grandfather of the
international Arts and Crafts Movement. In an era of
increasing industrialism and urbanization, he embraced an
idealized vision of the artisanship and cottage industries of
the Middle Ages.
• William Morris believed people should be surrounded by
beautiful, well-made things. This vision inspired the
emergence of the Arts and Crafts movement in the
1860s.
• Morris's lectures and essays on art and his rediscovery of
traditional craft techniques helped spread the Art and craft movement examole reflecting pre raphelite
movement, as did the decorative designs and products featutres
from his company: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.
• From a series of notable homes—the Red House, Upton,
Kent; Kelmscott Manor on the upper Thames; and
Kelmscott House, Morris's London house from 1878—he
carried on a prodigious activity as a public speaker,
member of committees and radical organizations, and
leader of the Arts and Craft movement.
• He founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient
Buildings in 1877 and the Kelmscott press in 1890.
The red house an inspiration of art and craft movement
ARTS AND CRAFT MOVEMENT
• The Arts and Crafts Movement (1850-1900) was a reaction
against the Industrial Revolution.
• The 'dark Satanic mills' of the Industrial Revolution .
• The members of the Arts and Crafts Movement included artists,
architects, designers, craftsmen and writers. They feared that
industrialization was destroying the environment in which
traditional skills and crafts could prosper, as machine production
had taken the pride, skill and design out of the quality of goods
being manufactured.
• Characteristics of the Arts and Crafts movement are :
A belief in craftsmanship which stresses the inherent beauty of The entrance hall at Wightwick Manor
the material. incorporated many Art and Crafts elements
The importance of nature as inspiration including Morris designed fabric on the wing
chair.
The value of simplicity, utility, and beauty.
The movement often promoted reform as part of its philosophy
and advanced the idea of the designer as craftsman.
• For Morris art was the very highest of realities, the spontaneous
expression of the pleasure of life innate in the whole people.
WILLIAM MORRIS
(1834-1896)
'African
Marigold', 1876 The Journal of the
(pencil and Century Guild
watercolour Hobby Horse
sketch for textile (Edition No1,
design). April 1884)
LITERALLY CAREER
• While Morris spent a majority of his life as an architect and working with textile designs, he was also a writer. He
wrote fiction, poetry and translated several ancient and medieval texts into English.
• Morris's literary career had commenced at Oxford, where he wrote prose romances for the Oxford and
Cambridge Magazine.
• His fame was confined to a small circle of admirers until The Earthy Paradise (3 vols., 1868-1870) established him
as a major romantic poet. He chose the device of legendary poems from classical and medieval sources recited
by Norwegian seamen who had sailed westward to find the earthly paradise.
• In 1868 Morris took up the study of Icelandic, published a translation of the Grettis Saga with the assistance of
Eiríkr Magnússon (1869), and visited Iceland in 1871 and 1873.
• Morris also translated The Aeneids (sic; 1875), the Odyssey (1887), Beowulf (1895), and Old French
Romances (1896). He regarded as his finest literary achievement Sigurd the Volsung, and Fall of the
Niblungs (1876), his own retelling in verse of the Icelandic prose Volsunga saga, a version J. W. Mackail (1899)
described as "the most Homeric poem which has been written since Homer.“
• When it came to prose, Morris wrote a lot of fantasy fiction,
mainly novels. These novels were The Wood Beyond the
World and The Well at the World’s End. These novels served
as inspirations for many authors in the later part of the 1900s.
• Many modern authors were heavily inspired by Morris’s
works. C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia is said to have
been drawn from The Wood Beyond the World. J. R. R. Tolkien
also admitted having been influenced by Morris’s