William Morris Victoria and Albert Museum, 9 May–1 September 1996

Abstract

Three items, each of which reveals a significant dimension of Morris's work as a designer and manufacturer of textiles, remain in my mind from the Victoria and Albert Museum's splendid exhibition. The first is the 'If I Can' hanging of r856-57; the second a group of letters, dating from r875 and r876, from Morris to Thomas Wardle of Leek; and the third is Burne-Jones's caricature of Morris giving a demonstration of weaving at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in November r888. Of the three, the 'If I Can' hanging is the most poignant, seeming to offer direct contact with Morris at a crucial phase in his career. Behind him lay an idyllic childhood in Walthamstow, the shock of his father's death when Morris was sixteen, the formative but often disappointing years at Marlborough and Oxford, the revelatory force of his exploration of French Gothic architecture in r854 and r855, the abandonment of his plan to enter the Church and his brief and abortive apprenticeship in G. E. Street's Oxford architectural practice. Now, influenced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and in company with his closest friend, Edward Burne-Jones, he had moved to London to begin his career as a painter. Since childhood he had been under the spell of the Middle Ages and when he found no contemporary furnishings to his taste, he set about designing his own in the medieval style. His visits to Queen Elizabeth's hunting lodge in Epping Forest had demonstrated the potential of wall hangings, and the 'If I Can' hanging represents the only surviving example of his earliest work in this medium. The design of repeating fruit tree with birds in flight was taken from a fifteenth-century manuscript, while the motto is a form of Jan van Eyck's 'Als ich kanne', seen on Morris's trip to the Low Countries in r856. The materials are simple: a plain linen ground with natural dyed wools. The work itself is tactfully described in the catalogue as 'unorthodox flat and patterned stitches', with which Morris may have had some help from Mary Nicholson, the servant at his rooms in Red Lion Square. It is simply done, but it has the charm and force of the naive. It shows Morris, characteristically, encountering a particular decorative need and discovering for himself the resources and techniques to fulfil that need. It was out of Morris's response to similar requirements for the decoration of Philip Webb's Red House, completed in r860, that Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. ('The Firm') was founded. The letters to Thomas Wardle, dating from nearly twenty years later than the hanging, find Morris at a very different stage in his career. By now well-known as both poet and designer, he was at the very beginning of his political activity. He also faced considerable challenges in his business life. In r875 'The Firm' was reconstituted as Morris arid Co., with Morris himself as sole proprietor. His investment income was falling, and it was essential for him to place the company on a sound footing; he therefore needed to ensure a