William Morris

i'm laurence llewelyn bowen please accompany me as I stroll through the history the culture of the alchemy of interior design and I have a very special traveling companion this time my favorite pattern ista mr. William Morris you know I'm not going to apologize this is going to be an unashamed hero ground to one of the Olympian gods of domestic design the patterns of William Morris trail a fabulously drawn comet L of glory across the face of Britain they have power they have integrity and their originality even today 150 years later is frankly gobsmacking when I was growing up my parents world was a friendly arid design scape of white painted walls moss green carpets and sturdily Brown Edwardian antiques the epitome of dron lowish style the only oasis in this desert have reserved suburban tastefulness was the undulating and succulent William Morris chrysanthemum Patton my mother had allowed the local upholsterer to use to recover the sofas and occasional chairs in the sitting room in very on Morris shades of emotionally-stunted ochre and stiff upper-lip green I loved the confident draftsmanship and the con brio choreography that sent sinuous tendrils and dangerously serrated petals on a mad dance all over our furniture in a house of straight lines it felt terribly terribly kinky and now well there's a new generation who are seeing Morris with fresh and excited eyes his nostalgic but actually strangely contemporary patterns in dense rich culinary color palettes are being hoovered up all over the high street the perfect pattern partner for everyone's favorite prairie style party dress so where did the William Morris genus come from there are three things you need to know about him that are crucial to understanding what he did well he was a hopeless romantic number two he grew up in a very wealthy solidly middle-class home and number three he had a big bum he is always described as being sturdy returned very hairy and neglectful of his appearance but he was also very clumsy and I can just see him growing up surrounded by his parents ostentatious clutter hemmed in by papier-mache whatnots and Louie there's something or another byblos all very twiddly all very expensive all very breakable he himself admitted that his childhood was overshadowed by the amount of chairs he break by sitting down on them rather abruptly his life was privileged and in smart upper middle class all viren's of 1840s orphaned stow a privilege was expressed at a Frenchified taste for immense rooms dripping with distinctly dragged up looking classical details it was this style of the court it was the style of the Morrises aristocratic betters betters who loved to show off all that made them the haves particularly to the wretched have-nots who were sweeping their grapes and buttoning their boots William Morris didn't like any of that at all at boarding school he doze in the shadows of the standing stones at Avebury or Stonehenge trying to cancel out in his head the grim grimy nurse of the modern world that surrounded him with daydreams of some kind of Ithorian mythical past which actually for him felt compellingly real the dark satanic Mills of Victorian commerce might have been paying his school fees but his head was very much in a romanticized medieval past and being a vigorous practical and connect get-up-and-go sort of guy he set his mind on making his daydreams a reality and of course thanks to the family he had plenty of cash to do it when he was at Oxford he met up with one of the art world superstars Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the poster boy of the pre-raphaelites Brotherhood who turned taste upside down in 1848 in an art world that had been dominated by huge highly sentimentalized canvases painted in nasty shades of gravy the small scale Joule bright paintings of the pre-raphaelites with their minut detail and breathless medieval narratives caused a sensation of all the artists in the Brotherhood Rosetti was the very incarnation of the naughty antisocial creator he was the most libidinous of them the most amoral the most bohemian and annoyingly for him the least talented Morris Rossetti and Morris's mate from Birmingham Ned burne-jones set out to peddle a misty medievalism that expressed itself in poetry actually be warned there's a little too many these and those in painting and in lifestyle with Rosetti and burne-jones focusing on painting William Morris used his family fortune to build a a nightly abode in the Kentish suburbs as the perfect medieval light context for the three friends and their wax talking of wives and girlfriends Morris had met and married Jane burden a pre-raphaelites stunner of the very first order she had a Rapunzel profusion of crinkly princess hair a cathedral column of a neck jaw proud smoldering coal and lips like huge overripe exploding cherries she was the antithesis of the tiny short-lived plump and pretty girl women mainstream society idolized she was a lioness a goddess a temptress and unfortunately Rosetti couldn't resist the temptation you know spitefully in later life jane said she'd never loved William but I'm sure that William the gent the grown-up the loyal and respected husband the devoted father of two rather delicate daughters took all of this on the chin he certainly stuck by her despite the gossip scandal and the tabloid disapproval of the Morris set chaotic private life aside William Morris flung himself into the design business he created with Rossetti and burne-jones still today it's difficult to find a church in the Victorian suburbs that doesn't have a Morrison Co stained-glass window a chalice with motifs designed by them or an altar rail strewn with their particular take on Gothic IV the Morris style also at the home William Morris poured his passions into the designs he created furniture was robust enough to withstand even him cutlery china ceramics all had a simple solid dignity just like their designer but it was the patents he started to draw for textiles wallpapers and linoleum floor coverings that really excited the home decorators of the 1870s and they continue to cite us today Morrises style is instantly recognizable and it Springs directly from the wistful romanticism he felt towards a distant time in history he believed to be fairer more peaceful more balanced a time before mass production and mechanization an era that predated the pernicious urbanization that was before his eyes creating a huge poverty-stricken underclass in a Victorian cities there was a lot of medievalism around at the time a lot of architects building fairytale palaces for plutocrats but Morris wasn't interested in reviving royal castles he was after something much more but for like him much more middle-class his love for the manors his Middle Ages was studded with solidly built manorial homesteads where the liberal enlightened almost socialists dare I say 'lord lived amongst an extended family and happily well-fed workers in a beautifully embroidered Eden of apple orchards and stenciled ceilings and this romantically egalitarian branding struck a resonant chord with Morris's own sort the cash swollen middle-class market who dismissed aristocratic style of the day as pretentious despotic and far far worse forum I've never actually felt that William Morris made a design decision just to be clever or just to be candy he kind of just did things because he felt they were right and one of his biggest innovations has his straightforwardness written all over him before him floral fabrics were rich they were saturated posies of tropically inspired blooms and floral exotica fellow taste makers like Owen Jones and Augustus fusion were they were appalled at all of this botanic licentiousness and they pioneered flattened primitive gothic shapes as a righteous alternative florists didn't do that in fact he kept all of that highly attractive highly seductive ripe blouse eNOS but he substituted his graphic version of the British hedgerow the very thing that would move him to tears on his Saturday afternoon nature rambles so instead of the fleur-de-lis or heraldic lions of the Gothic hardcore his patterns hero sex that fritillary willow seaweed an enemies tulips and of course strawberry thieves and the good burgers and burger s's of britain in their newly built half timbered tile hung manorial style suburban villas they lapped it up because thanks to him they could have all the high fat decorative detail they loved but with none of that decidedly off-color Orientalism Tukey of color Morris turned his back on those piercing shades of mow violet emerald and cerulean that chemistry could now provide for designers instead true to himself he went back to the recipe book mixing his own home dye concoctions of onion skins walnut shells madder and the Indigo that left his hands almost permanently stained Smurf blue not a great look for one so ginger so what is it that makes a Morris pattern so damn powerful come on let's hold hands and jump together into the cool embrace of this honeysuckle from 1876 it is classic morris exquisitely drawn with a fairytale attention to detail and a dizzyingly muscular sense of movement which is funny because he actually quit painting because he felt his art had so little energy something you'd never accuse his patterns of it's a harmonious natural color palette that when you think about it just radiates summer you've got those cool shade giving greens with pollen a table pinks singing out from the undergrowth crucially though it is all about his particular design DNA he hasn't slavishly copied the honeysuckle all those really well the tulips he's abstracted the sinuous acanthus to act as a a kind of foliage frame on which to hang those shoots and those tendrils this has artistry artistic insight and it also has skip loads of love William Morris has often been derided for failing to do what he set out to do which was to provide quality hand-wrought design for the masses and I don't think that's fare in his own day sure his style wasn't cheap but then it wasn't stupidly expensive either he was hugely benevolent to his workers he had a deliberate policy of employing apprentices from the workhouse giving the abject poor a chance to become skilled artisans and actually although Morris labelled product might have been only affordable to the moneyed middle of society his influence was so pervasive that his style his approach actually hit the mass-market very quickly and today you can buy Morris in H&M or inherits the story ends in a Cotswolds manor house very like this one with William Morris dying quietly at home the design conscious suburbs borned his international customer base mourned the nation mourned they mourned the passing of this good kind energetic man who definitely left his world that little bit better that little bit lovelier to live in so come on LeBron let's raise of ours full of gin to the iconic mr. Morris and his inescapably lovely patterns as someone of taste and refinement I suggest you subscribe to school a flop so you get the latest

Channel: Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's School of Flock

Views: 7,730

Rating: 4.9384613 out of 5

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Id: AiR-vsYb5OU

Length: 16min 12sec (972 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020