189th Birthday Lecture: “Gardening with silk and gold thread” botanical imagery in the work of the art embroidery designer May Morris

Lecture by Dr. Lynn Hulse 
Saturday, March 25, 2023
 Zoom at 3 pm EDT

*Lecture followed by a presentation of this year's birthday cake and toast

Embroidery design by May Morris (c1900) © National Museums Scotland

The development of the English cottage garden in the hands of the Irish horticulturalist and journalist William Robinson (1838-1935) had a marked effect on the textile arts during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Author of The Wild Garden (1870) and The English Flowered Garden (1883), Robinson rejected the artificiality and formality of High Victorian pattern gardening in favour of naturalised plantings of perennial shrubs and climbers. His revolutionary approach was reflected in the choice of botanical imagery featured in the work of many Arts and Crafts designers, including May Morris (1862-1938), one of the leading exponents of art embroidery. A constant theme in the work of May Morris is her love of English meadow plants and cottage garden flowers.

Throughout her life, she made detailed studies of plant life to familiarise herself ‘with all the possible peculiarities and diversities of such things.’ But like many other writers on art embroidery, she recognised that the designer’s work ‘should merely recall nature, not absolutely copy it’ (Decorative Needlework, 1893). May Morris’s approach to conventional design will be examined through her work for the embroidery department at Morris & Co. and her special commissions and gifts for family and friends.

Dr Lynn Hulse is a Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London. She is also co-founder of Ornamental Embroidery, which specialises in the teaching and designing of historic hand stitch through workshops in museums, art galleries and historic houses across the UK. Recent exhibitions include The Needle’s Excellency: contemporary raised work at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (April - June 2017) and the Knitting and Stitching Show (2018), and The Needle’s Art: contemporary hand embroidery inspired by an early Tudor pattern book at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (November 2021- January 2022). Lynn has published widely on the development of art embroidery and is the editor of May Morris: Art and Life (2017) and The Needle’s Excellency: English raised embroidery (2018). She is currently completing a book on Lady Victoria Welby and the founding of the Royal School of Needlework.

Website: www.ornamentalembroidery.com

Email: info@ornamentalembroidery.com 

Twitter: OEStitch

Instagram: ornamentalembroidery

Members Only Event: The Sister Arts: Fashioning the Victorian Luxury Book

 The Sister Arts: Fashioning the Victorian Luxury Book

Tuesday February 21st, 2023.

Guided tour of the current exhibition.

In-person event: Members please check your email for the sign-up link!

During the long nineteenth century (1789-1914), technologies proliferated to make books into beautiful objects that combined illustration with verse, uniting the 'sister arts' of painting and poetry. The Sister Arts: Fashioning the Victorian Luxury Book explores the ways that luxury book manufacture came to provide roles for women in the book arts, initiating a sisterhood of illustrators, illuminators, engravers, designers, compositors, and even publishers. The manufacture of these beautiful books provided women with the opportunity to adopt a range of professional roles in the book world.

Alongside masterpieces of the fine press, books made and designed by women are featured throughout the exhibition, including Victorian albums and annuals; publications by Emily Faithfull’s Victoria Press and the Yeats Sisters’ Cuala Press; an illuminated manuscript by Lady Louisa Strange; and books featuring women artists, including Phoebe Anna Traquair, Jessie M. King, Anne Lydia Bond, and HRH Princess Beatrice. Highlights of this exhibition include the 1857 Moxon Tennyson, with Pre Raphaelite wood engravings ; two manuscripts illuminated by Alberto Sangorski; the elephant folio edition of Henry Noel Humphreys’s guide to The Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages (1849); decadent Belles Lettres limited editions; and the Kelmscott Chaucer (1896), widely agreed to be the most beautiful book ever printed in English. Focused on British publications, the scope of the exhibition extends from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the onset of the First World War.

The Rossettis at Tate Britain

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, 1855

A major exhibition devoted to the radical Rossetti generation
April 6 - September 24th, 2023

This exhibition follows the romance and radicalism of the Rossetti generation, through and beyond the Pre-Raphaelite years: Dante Gabriel, Christina and Elizabeth (née Siddal). Visitors will get to experience world-renowned works from their boundary-pushing careers.

The Rossettis’ approach to art, love and lifestyles are considered revolutionary, and this will be thoroughly explored in an immersive show, using spoken poetry, drawings, paintings, photography, design and more.

This is the first retrospective of Dante Gabriel Rossetti at Tate and the largest exhibition of his iconic pictures in two decades.

It will also be the most comprehensive exhibition of Elizabeth Siddal’s work for 30 years, featuring rare surviving watercolours and important drawings.

The Rossettis will take a fresh look at the fascinating myths surrounding the unconventional relationships between Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris.

More information here.

 

At Home with Jane and William Morris – A New Joint Biography

by Dr. Suzanne Fagence Cooper

 

 

George Bernard Shaw called her ‘the silentest woman I ever met’.  And Henry James said she was ‘an apparition of fearful and wonderful intensity’. But these famous descriptions do Jane Morris a disservice. As a model for Gabriel Rossetti, she became Queen Guenevere, Pandora or Persephone. But should we accept that these images reflect the reality of Jane’s life and character? With the publication of her letters, edited by Jane Marsh and Frank L Sharp, we can recreate a fully rounded picture of the lives of both Jane and William Morris, their family and their close circle. As we read Jane’s words, we can reconsider the creativity of the women who pioneered the Arts and Crafts movement. Jane was an outstanding embroiderer, and ran the needlework department of Morris and Company for over a decade. She built a network of female friends and colleagues, and hosted poets, anarchists and artists at her homes in Kent, London and Oxfordshire. For the first time, we can see how she and William Morris worked together to develop a radical household. As he said, ‘the true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life’.

Read the full review here.

Merton Priory - History Unearthed

 

Emery Walker's Arts & Crafts Home

 

The World of Interiors presents Visitors’ Book from Emery Walker’s House at 7 Hammersmith Terrace. Together with William Morris, Emery Walker was a trailblazer of the arts and crafts movement during the 19th and 20th century. Emery Walker’s Georgian terrace overlooks London’s River Thames, and is preserved as a snapshot in time with Walker’s furniture and objects. 

From the drawer containing some of William Morris’ personal items to the hand-embroidered coverlet by William’s daughter, May Morris, the densely-decorated, jewel-toned interiors preserve a vibrant slice of Walker’s milieu. “Emery Walker’s house is a really unique survival of a truly authentic arts and crafts interior,” says Helen Elletson, curator of the William Morris society. Watch the full episode of Visitors’ Book as we explore Emery Walker’s charming and historic house, and view the new collection of wallpapers and fabrics from Morris & Co, which are inspired by the house.

Read the full story: https://www.worldofinteriors.com/story/emery-walker-house-morris-co

Members Only Zoom Lecture: Morris at Merton

 

Morris at Merton

A lecture from the UK by John Hawks

Sunday January 22, 2023, 12PM EST

Zoom Lecture

"The Pond at Merton Abbey" or "The Pond at William Morris's Works at Merton" by L. L. Pocock, watercolour, now in the Victoria & Albert Museum. William Morris acquired the old silk works at Merton Abbey Mills in June 1881 and relocated the workshops of Morris & Co. to Merton.

In 1881 William Morris moved his weaving, dyeing and stained glass works to picturesque old buildings in Merton, then a village in South London near Wimbledon. The works continued there for another 44 years after his death, finally closing in 1940. They were known as the “Merton Abbey works” because this had once been the historic site of a major priory - which would certainly have appealed to the passionate medievalist in Morris, though more important to him was the water quality of the River Wandle which flows through Merton, a chalk stream ideal for his traditional processes. This period of his life and achievement is described by John Hawks, a trustee of the Wandle Industrial Museum and Merton Priory Trust.

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