So much to this book
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Saturday, April 6, 2013
May Morris (1862-1938), designer and embroiderer
May Morris (1862-1938), designer and embroiderer
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To celebrate the opening of Nicola's show The Art of Embroidery: Nicola Jarvis and May Morris (6 July-22 September 2013), Ornamental Embroidery is running a one-day workshop at the William Morris Gallery in which students will stitch a botanical sampler in the style of May Morris and learn about the embroidery department at Morris & Co. The sampler will explore a range of stitches described in May's 1893 publication Decorative Needlework, including couching, brick stitch and laid work.
To book, telephone the William Morris Gallery on 020 8496 4390 or email wmg.bookings@walthamforest.gov
Friday, April 5, 2013
Marie Stillman
MARIE STILLMAN
1844-1927
THE LONG WALK AT KELMSCOTT MANOR, OXFORDSHIRE
watercolour with bodycolour
34 by 52 cm. ; 13 1/2 by 20 1/2 in.
Born in 1844 in Tottenham, Middlesex (other sources state that it was Hornsey), Marie was the youngest daughter of Michael Spartali, a wealthy and cosmopolitan merchant and later Greek consul general for London and his wife Euphrosyne. Marie and her sister Christine and brother Demetrius were raised in a large house in Clapham, which became the centre of the Greek community in the 1860s. The Anglo-Greek connoisseur Constantine Ionides who patronised Burne-Jones and Rossetti and whose collection is now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, was a great friend of the Spartalis and it was probably this connection that led to Marie being 'discovered' by the Pre-Raphaelites.
Marie was also a close friend of Maria Zambaco (née Cassavetti), Burne-Jones’ mistress and model, and Aglaia Coronio, the confidante of both Rossetti and William Morris. The three women were known as the ‘Three Graces’ after
their Greek heritage and striking beauty. Marie's fine looks attracted several artists who portrayed her, including the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, Watts, Prinsep, Spencer Stanhope, Rossetti and Burne-Jones. Today she is
well known for being an artist's model but equally as a painter in watercolours.
Marie took lessons in drawing from Ford Madox Brown in his studio on Fitzroy Square and soon showed great promise as a painter. She possessed a warm and generous personality, great intelligence and much artistic talent.
She was arguably the most talented of the female Pre-Raphaelite artists, painting over a hundred works in the 1870s and 1880s in a rich style derived from that of Rossetti and Madox Brown. The files at the Delaware Art Museum note
that 'she was a very serious artist, working regularly every day in a very disciplined way until her death in 1927 at the age of eighty-three' (catalogue of the collection of the Delaware Art Museum 1974, pg. 172).
FEEDING THE DOVES AT KELMSCOTT MANOR, OXFORDSHIRE
signed on the reverse: Mrs Stillman
watercolour with bodycolour
34 by 52 cm. ; 13 1/2 by 20 1/2 in.
The limestone Tudor farmhouse of Kelmscott Manor on the Thames near Lechlade, as the country residence of the designer William Morris, from the summer of 1869 onwards. 'The beautiful old house, and the quaint, romantic chamber that served for a studio, became the resort of poets and artists, critics and connoisseurs, disciples and aspirants, in companies small indeed, but brilliant and memorable...' (Esther Wood, Dante Rossetti and the PreRaphaelite Movement, 1898, pg. 178).
Morris shared the lease of Kelmscott with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and it was here that Rossetti painted several of his most atmospheric images of Morris's wife, the beautiful Jane with whom Rossetti was infatuated. Marie Stillman was a frequent visitor to Kelmscott after Morris' death in 1896 and was a great friend of Jane. In 1913 Marie exhibited a work at the Royal Academy entitled Kelmscott Manor.
Shoot me down but I've always thought this was Jane in the first picture and the two girls in the second ?
Thursday, March 28, 2013
William Morris birthdays
William Morris, aged 53
Birthdays were an occasion for Morris’s more immediate family, especially since his daughter May was born on 25 March and they often held a joint celebration. If Morris was away, he would report back on his birthday to his family. An 1878 letter to his (two) daughters shows parental kindness moderating, but not effacing, Morris’s critical eye for design detail; he thanks May for her gift of a very pretty ‘baccy pouch’ but insists that the cotton strings will need replacing with silk to avoid setting his teeth on edge when opening it. In the same year, he provided his wife Jane with a humorous sketch of the morning after his birthday dinner with his mother and (second) sister Henrietta in Much Hadham, in Hertfordshire. Rogers (his mother’s maid) had cut his hair in the presence of not only his ‘kinswomen’ but also his mother’s parrot; the latter, at least, was seemingly delighted with the entertainment and ‘mewed & barked & swore & sang at the top of his vulgar voice’.
Birthdays were also an occasion for being remembered by, and spending time with, his friends. In thanking Louisa Baldwin for ‘remembering me & my birthday’ in 1875, Morris added that he had always been a lucky man with his friends. Those friendships, however, were sometimes tested by his occasional ill-humour and quick temper (usually immediately followed by embarrassment and regret). After one especially ‘crabby’ birthday evening (1869) spent in the company of Edward Burne Jones (‘Ned’) and Charles Fairfax Murray, Morris felt obliged to write apologies to both men. Admitting that he could be ‘like a hedgehog with nastiness’, Morris craved forgiveness from Burne-Jones on the grounds that he simply could not do without him.
http://blog.oup.com/2013/
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