JANE MORRIS: THE HOSPITABLE HEART
By looking more closely at the
idea of the welcoming spirit, the hospitable heart, we can reconsider Jane
Morris and her role in the making of the House Beautiful in late Victorian
Britain. What happens when we draw attention to creative conversations, and the
networks formed when sharing skills, house-space and food? We can open up new
ways of understanding the radical nature of the Arts and Crafts movement, when
we rethink our assumptions about domesticity and female labour.
It is notable, however, that the women in the circle maintained their own
creative conversations. They visited Red House without their husbands, spending
time in the gardens with Jane, sharing hopes for their projects and their
pregnancies. Elizabeth Siddall worked on murals for Jane’s bedroom while
Rossetti remained in London. Siddall’s death in 1862 after her child was
stillborn caused another rupture in the familiar patterns of friendship. But
Georgie Burne-Jones carried on staying with Jane in Kent. They talked seriously
of building an extension to Red House so that the Burne-Jones family could move
there permanently, with the two households living side by side. Philip Webb drew
up the plans in 1864. However, the needs of the new business meant that the
Morris family left Red House in 1865. They moved to Queen Square in the heart of
London, to live above the showroom and workshops. Home-life and work-life were
brought back under the same roof again.
Many of the
memories about Jane’s hospitality are set in the gardens of their first family
home at Red House in Kent, or in the grounds of Kelmscott Manor. They are part
of the rich relationship between the Arts and Crafts movement and the natural
world. A fondness for kitchen gardens, hedgerows, orchards and wildflower
meadows underpinned William Morris’s patterns, with their lush layers of
overlapping plant forms. His designs are replete with blossoming, fruiting,
growing things. Fabrics, wallpapers and books are decorated with pomegranates
and grapes, apples and strawberries, barely contained within the borders.
This
delight in abundance relates partly to William Morris’s childhood surrounded by
productive gardens as well as the wild spaces of Epping Forest. It also derives
from the central text that William Morris read as a young man and reprinted for
the Kelmscott Press in 1892. John Ruskin’s chapter on ‘The Nature of Gothic’ was
described by William Morris as ‘one of the very few necessary and inevitable
utterances of the century…it seemed to point out a new world on which the world
should travel’ . Ruskin suggested several key characteristics of Gothic art that
shaped the world-view of William Morris and his family. These included
‘Naturalism’, when the ‘living foliage became a subject of intense affection’ .
Ruskin also dwelt on the importance of ‘Redundance’ or generosity’. For him, it
was made visible in a ‘magnificent enthusiasm…an unselfishness of sacrifice…a
profound sympathy with the fulness and wealth of the material universe…the study
of the minute and various work of Nature’ . This ‘magnificent enthusiasm’ was
translated by William Morris into his fascination with plants, but also his
unflagging productivity as a designer and maker, and his vigorous political
campaigning in later life.
For Jane Morris, Ruskinian ‘Redundance’ took other
forms. She was supported in her lifestyle by the financial security of her
husband’s inheritance, and by the help of servants. However, her own upbringing
had been precarious, and she had only escaped poverty through her marriage. She
recognised the privilege of having plenty – ample food, time, space, warmth. She
responded by making full use of the opportunities that were opened to her. She
read widely and made music. She travelled to Italy and Egypt. She stitched vast
textiles covered with buds and blooms. She also produced feasts for family and
friends. In her home, there was an abundance of food to be shared, baskets of
fruit, jars of preserves and chutneys to be given away, and opportunities for
creative sociability. It is therefore worth taking time to unpick the tales of
some of these gatherings, as they intertwined with key moments in the making of
the Arts and Crafts movement.
The first, and arguably most significant, was the
Christening party for Jenny Morris, held at Red House on 21st February 1861.
When the couple moved in after their honeymoon, ‘the walls were bare, and the
floors; nor could Morris have endured any chair, table, sofa or bed, nor any
hangings such as were then in existence’ . William, Jane and their guests had
transformed the empty interiors. They painted the walls, stencilled the
ceilings, stitched hangings and designed stained glass, choosing subjects from
medieval legends of beautiful women and merry-making.
 |
| Burne-Jones, Marriage of Sir Degrevaunt, c.1860 |
There was space for
visitors, with two or three couples taking over the spare rooms and studio at
weekends throughout the summer and autumn of 1860. Most of their artist friends
lived in furnished rooms in London, without full kitchens. The Rossettis usually
ate out in restaurants. Emma Madox Brown felt fortunate when she could afford
teenager from the workhouse to help her with the chores. Meanwhile Jane managed
four servants at Red House, who had the use of a pantry, scullery, larder, china
closet, storerooms and a large kitchen range. It was a house made for
sociability. William Morris had ordered two great trestle tables for the dining
room. A friend remembered how ‘it was the most beautiful sight in the world to
see Morris coming up from the cellar before dinner, beaming with joy, with his
hands full of bottles of wine, and others tucked under his arms’ . Together Jane
and William ensured that their own prosperity was shared with the other young
people in their circle.
For Jenny’s Christening, Red House was full. Georgie
Burne-Jones recalled how, late at night, she moved with Jane through the
darkened house, checking that the guests were all comfortable. They took ‘a
candle to look at the beds strewn about the drawing room for the men. Swinburne
had a sofa; I think P P Marshall’s was made on the floor’ . It was Jane’s role
to be sure that everyone was well fed, and that there were blankets and pillows
for all. She laid the groundwork to create the right conditions for good
fellowship. By bringing everyone under their roof in this open-handed way, she
and William demonstrated the possibilities of living differently. As William
explained, ‘the house that would please me would be some great room, where one
talked to one’s friends in one corner, and ate in another, and slept in another,
and worked in another’ . There were to be no boundaries between home-life and
the production of poetry, art or practical things.
According to William Morris’s
first biographer, Red House had always been intended as more than ‘a place to
live in, but as a fixed centre and background for his artistic work’ . The
Christening party provided the opportunity to turn their emerging ideas about
interior design into something concrete. Fruitful discussions held that weekend
resulted in the formation of a new business venture, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner
and Company. William Morris described it to a friend as ‘the only really
artistic firm of the kind’ . It marked a deliberate shift, from a project
intended for private amusement and personal taste, to a commercial business
supplying decorative schemes for homes and churches. It also changed the nature
of the relationships between the friends. The husbands took on paid roles within
the new company. They met weekly in central London to discuss commissions. The
wives, including Jane, were not mentioned in the early financial accounts,
although they were making embroideries for sale. And they were excluded from
formal business decisions. Georgie Burne-Jones wrote poignantly about ‘the
feeling of exile’ at this time .
 |
| Rossetti, Jane Morris: The Gold Chain, 1868 |
Jane continued to entertain their
friends at Queen Square. She and William hosted a memorable dinner party to
celebrate the publication of his collection of poems, The Earthly Paradise in
May 1868. The evening was delightfully stage-managed. Twenty guests sat around
the massive trestle table in the ‘stately five-windowed room’, filled with
visual delights: ‘the old silver and blue china…the greenish glass of delicate
shapes’ that ‘gleamed like air-bubbles…and was reflected far away in the little
mirrors set into the chimney-piece’ . The poet William Allingham and Frederick
Ellis, Morris’s publisher, joined artist friends from the Red House days. The
‘storm of talking’ carried on late into the night. Dinners like this allowed
unconventional writers and painters to make connections. They also helped to
cement the position of the Morris household as an embodiment of the House
Beautiful. Their avant-garde use of antique blue and white ceramics was an
essential part of the experience, but so was Jane’s presence; her distinctive
appearance as well as her skilful housekeeping.
Other gatherings were more
informal, but still significant in strengthening the distinctive bonhomie of
their circle, weaving together art and fellowship in pleasing settings. In the
summers of 1876 and 1877, Jane organised holidays in Broadway Tower, a folly in
the Cotswolds. William Morris joined her, along with Georgie Burne-Jones,
Cormell Price, Charley Faulkner, his sister Kate and others. The expeditions
were like camping trips, with some of the men choosing to sleep outside on the
top of the tower, and bathing there too, ‘when the wind didn’t blow the soap
away’ . Jane arrived a few days early with her daughter May to prepare the
space. She organised bedding and hampers of food, and checked supplies of water
and firewood. The other guests could enjoy impromptu picnics and long walks
because she had thought through the domestic details. Jane created opportunities
for companionship. Their circle was bound together by these shared pleasures as
well as artistic ambitions. Jane recognised the need to refresh their
connections around the table at home, or on holiday.
A few years later in 1880
the Morris family and friends, including the potter William de Morgan, made
another expedition, from their riverside house in Hammersmith to Kelmscott
Manor. They travelled along the Thames, in a hired boat called the Ark which May
described as ‘an insane gondola’ . On this occasion, William chose to cook for
the group, and their friend Crom Price supplied the drinks. ‘Everybody
perpetually gave orders in a very loud voice and …nobody ever paid the slightest
attention to them’ ; meanwhile Jane continued working on her sewing from her
place in the stern, as the young people took turns to row. She left the party at
Oxford, and went ahead to Kelmscott Manor to ready the house for guests. The
others ‘fastened a lantern to the prow’ of their boat and made their way slowly
in the dark. William described how the tired travellers approached the house,
seeing the lamps and the woman at the open door.
This homecoming seemed like the
resolution of one of William’s questing tales. As he told Georgie Burne-Jones,
‘The ancient house had me in its arms again’. William recognised this was Jane’s
doing, that it required forethought and kindliness. ‘J. had lighted up all
brilliantly,’ he wrote, ‘and sweet it all looked, you may be sure’ . The house
and the woman together embraced the travellers.
 |
| William Morris, 'News from Nowhere', Kelmscott Press |
It is rare that Jane’s presence was acknowledged so clearly, seen and felt in
overlapping sensations of warmth, light and the savour of good food. The
beautiful woman and the House Beautiful were experienced simultaneously at the
end of this journey. Jane’s presentation of Self and Home were both creative
constructs, and had been carefully fashioned since the early days of her
marriage. They were entangled in the memories and artworks of those who
encountered Jane at home. But the labour – emotional, artistic and domestic –
that sustained the idyll of Red House or Kelmscott Manor was usually overlooked
and undervalued.
Comments
Post a Comment