William Morris

As a child his romantic attachment to the natural world was already forming and evolving.

While attending Exeter College at Oxford in 1853, he met Ned Burne-Jones. Morris and Burne-Jones found a common passion for medievalism, particularly the Arthurian legends. Together, they toured the great Gothic cathedrals of France this was to be the basis for a life-long friendship.

In 1856, Morris left school and moved to Red Lion Square with Ned, now an artist being mentored by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Morris was receiving a generous allowance for those days, and was able to be generous with his less prosperous friends.

While his parents would have preferred Morris to pursue a life with the clergy, he was bound and determined to live his life in a different way. He worked for the architectural office of G. E. Street and became interested in old building preservation. Preserving gothic and medieval styles were very much a part of his Pre-Raphaelite vision, as is later illustrated with his attempt to resurrect the illuminated manuscript.

In 1857 Morris, Burne-Jones, Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelites painted the Oxford Union frescoes. Morris' philosophies converged with the Pre-Raphaelites, and evolved into his unique design style: organic in an age of artificial colours, mass production, and unnatural designs.

Morris met Jane Burden, who was modelling for Rossetti. She and her sister were local shop girls, born poor, as were a number of the Pre-Raphaelite women. The artist's attraction to the myth of Pygmalion transforming Galatea was another popular image in those days.

Morris painted Jane as Isolde (medieval wife of King Mark who falls in love with Tristan) in his only known canvas. He wrote, "I cannot paint you, but I love you." It might appear he felt he could better write about her? Charles Algernon Swinburne encouraged him to consider having his poems published.

Her great eyes, standing far apart,

Draw up some memory from her heart,

And gaze out very mournfully;

--Beata mean Domina!--

So beautiful and kind they are,

But most times looking out afar,

Waiting for something, not for me.

--Beata mean Domina!--

The following year, Morris at twenty-five and Jane Burden  aged  eighteen, were married.

While Morris was courting Jane, he arranged for both her  and her sister to be taught how to weave. The first years of their marriage were quite happy. Their two daughters, Jenny and May, were born. Morris was obviously a devoted father, referring to them in letters as "the littles." Their daughter May became a leading weaver in England.

In 1860, Morris commissioned Philip Webb to design Red House in South London.

In 1861, Morris began writing The Earthly Paradise.

His decorating style was revolutionary because it was natural in an age just embracing mass-production and lower standards in quality, colour and design. Morris was such a perfectionist about colour that for weeks his hands were dyed blue as he sloshed around in the dye vats searching for the perfect hue. His style is rich but simple, rejecting the opulence of the French, royalist influence on the Victorian, and focusing on the more Gothic, medieval side of the era. Morris believed that everything in the home should be beautiful and functional Frank Lloyd Wright said Morris was a direct influence. And this can all be credited to the man who once said, "I am a boor and the son of a boor!" (reference to his Welsh background).

By 1865, troubled by an affair between Jane and Rossetti, Morris grew obsessed with taking a pilgrimage to Iceland. Their myths, steeped with brotherhood and endurance, touched him deeply. He made two pivotal trips there, eventually producing the first major translations of the myths. The living conditions in Iceland took him totally by surprise. He'd always been liberal, but now he saw something that transcended the British social structure. In Iceland, everyone lived poor. Yet they were happy in a noble, teeth-gritting sort of way. When he returned to England, he was shocked at how the houses seemed so big against the horizon. In Iceland, the houses were small and functional-- and the countryside seemed so awesome and vast.

After his second trip to Iceland, Morris returned home and began dissolving his friendship with Rossetti, first ousting him from Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire (they'd shared tenancy since 1871). Without the share they'd been collecting from Rossetti, Morris moved his wife and daughters to the smaller Kelmscott House in Hammersmith. Morris returned to one of his favorite past-times: weaving.

His trips to Iceland were part of the catalyst for getting Morris more involved in politics, more specifically British Marx-based Socialism.

The Wood Beyond the World, one of the most influential of Morris's Utopian prose fantasies, was published in 1894. His prose influenced the burgeoning genre of fantasy/utopia/science fiction-- C.S. Lewis named Morris as a favorite.

He died at the age of 62, at home, his doctor giving his cause of death as "simply being William Morris and having done more work that most ten men." He was buried in the Kelmscott Village churchyard.