William Morris began producing tapestries in 1879. His firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company had been founded in 1861 with a group of friends and fellow artists, and found rapid success designing furniture and textiles inspired by medieval precedents. The introduction of tapestry weaving built on the reputation of this business, and was facilitated by a move to new premises at Merton Abbey in South London in 1881, which had the space for four tapestry looms and the training of apprentices. Morris was able to realise the potential of tapestry to embody both notions of the handmade, newly prized in an age of advanced mechanisation, and a plausible version of the Gothic which appealed to a new breed of modern British and global consumers.
Morris’s commitment to resurrecting the purity of Gothic art did not mean the slavish copying of medieval tapestries; instead he sought to creatively evoke what he perceived as the spirit of the Gothic. Two works in the National Trust’s collection display Morris’s solution to this problem: a narrow panel of St Agnes(below), woven in 1879, and a workshop sketch for a tapestry of Pomona (above) made at around the same time. Both feature a central figure designed by Morris’s friend and long-term collaborator Edward Burne-Jones (1833–98), set on a verdure ground, the grounds designed by Morris (Pomona) and his principal assistant Henry Dearle (1859–1939; Saint Agnes). A similar concept lay behind the Forest, with animals based on drawings by Philip Webb (1831–1915), recently acquired by the National Trust; they emerge from a rich verdure ground, once again designed by Morris and Dearle. Virtually all of the Morris and Company tapestries produced during Morris’s lifetime would share this simple figure-on-verdure format, which expressed Morris’s strongly held beliefs on historic tapestry design. These ideas can be traced back to youthful trips to Paris in 1853–4, which helped form his and Burne-Jones’s idea of a specifically northern European Gothic. Here Morris encountered tapestries known as La Vie Seigneuriale, with courtly figures on a millefleur ground, which would provide the model for his later work. Significantly, although Morris knew that the tapestries dated to the early sixteenth century, he asserted that they should ‘be considered as belonging in spirit to the fourteenth century’ – the period which he saw as the high point of medieval art. The apparently simple formula of St Agnes and Pomona resulted from a creative reimagining of the Gothic, which stemmed from Morris’s moral and aesthetic convictions.
Morris sought a return to what he saw as the truth and vitality of medieval design, which he felt was an expression of the creative intelligence of the individual craftsperson. Morris’s central belief in the moral qualities of the aesthetic bore the influence of John Ruskin, whose important essay, The Nature of Gothic, was published in 1854. Ruskin believed that the spirit of an age was expressed in the nature of its artistic forms, and exalted the ‘savageness’ and freedom of Gothic. He also spoke passionately about the degrading nature of the modern factory system, which he deemed a form of slavery. Morris absorbed these ideas, and all his textile ventures sought a return to the qualities of the handmade, and the principles of design which, he felt, emanated from the living relationship between the craftsperson and their work. The entirely handmade nature of tapestry made it a kind of talisman for Morris’s entire textile output: as he put it, ‘The noblest of the weaving arts is Tapestry, in which there is nothing mechanical.’
Morris’s introduction to tapestry weaving was famously symbolic. Evidently perceiving there was no one in the modern world he could learn from, he proposed to single-handedly restore tapestry to its medieval purity, and began by setting up a loom in his bedroom and teaching himself to weave with the aid of an old French technical manual. Although he praised the traditional skill of his contemporaries at the French manufactures nationales, he believed their work to be an ‘idiotic waste of human labour’, and dismissed Windsor as ‘another branch of the same stupidity’. His issue was the attempt to imitate the effects of painting, which he saw as betraying the nature of the medium. Influenced by his early association with the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, he wrote of the ‘degradation’ of tapestry design from the mid sixteenth century onwards, and was particularly critical of the Gobelins. Specifically, he criticised ‘the arrangement of figures and landscape as in a picture proper, with foreground, middle distance, and distance’.
Morris’s tapestries met with considerable critical and commercial success. Tellingly, his dream of installing them on the walls of an ancient manor house was never to come to pass: the majority of his patrons came from a newly rich class of industrialists and entrepreneurs, who had benefited from the very capitalist system that Morris so despised.This class was not just national but international, and important tapestries were sold to patrons in North America, South Africa and Australia; others commemorated the efforts of institutions in Britain committed to the imperial mission. Although cruelly distant from the utopian socialist ideal that Morris became increasingly devoted to, Morris’s clientele of businessmen and entrepreneurs represented the class who most urgently needed a plausible, modern version of the Gothic, to help create a historically rooted identity for the new world order they were instrumental in constructing. Their interest in Morris’s tapestries, far from representing a failure, shows the extent to which his work was a radical response to the modern world, not simply a revival of the old. Writing in 1912, the American tapestry scholar Helen Churchill Candee was perceptive enough to describe the best of Morris’s tapestries as ‘most enchantingly mediaeval and most modernly perfect’.
The Art of Tapestry by Helen Wyld (Philip Wilson Publishers) is out now. Buy a copy here.
