JANE MORRIS: THE HOSPITABLE HEART
As we look forward to the summer holidays, I thought I would share with you an extract from my essay on Jane Morris as the welcoming hostess: she and her husband William Morris encouraged visitors to their country houses in Kent and Oxfordshire. And they also gathered their friends for good food and creative conversations in their house in London. This is a short version of a paper I presented in April at a seminar in Sweden, as part of a wonderful 'Arts and Crafts' project supported by the Ax:son Johnson Foundation. The full papers, including essays on John Ruskin, Carl and Karin Larsson, and women artists and designers, will be published later this year . Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Jane Morris in Icelandic Dress , 1873 In her decorative keepsake books, created from the late 1880s, Jane Morris transcribed quotations that appealed to her. On the first page of one book, bound in ivory leather, she noted an old French proverb: ‘Ayons le coeur et l’esprit hospitaliers’. This p...
