"If I were asked to say what is at once the most important production of Art and the thing most to be longed for, I should answer, A beautiful House" William Morris wrote in 1892.
In 1853, William Morris enrolled at the Exeter College in Oxford and became really close to another student Edward Burne-Jones.
Both were struck by the beauty of Oxford’s medieval buildings and influenced by the essay about the nature of Gothic architecture, contained in the second volume The Stone of Venice, by the art critic John Ruskin.
For this reason, they decided to make a trip to France in 1855 to admire the great gothic cathedrals, and both concluded that they wanted to dedicate their lives to art.
In 1856, Morris joined in an internship at the Oxford office of the architect George Edmund Street, a key figure in the Gothic Revival and famous for having built the Royal Courts of Justice in London. At the studio, Morris forged a deep friendship with the architect Philip Webb, that will be fundamental to his future artistic career.
In the same year, he met the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who encouraged him to leave architecture for painting and together with his friend Burne-Jones moved to London and opened a painting studio in Red Lion Square.
Rossetti called the two painters for the decoration of the Oxford Union’s Debates Room, which was to be decorated with Arthurian subjects. Morris' technical and artistic contribution to this project was actually a failure, but he got to know his future wife Jane Burden, chosen by Rossetti as the model for the subjects of the frescoes.
Morris decided to portray her, as the Beautiful Iseult (La Belle Iseult), loved by Tristan, but had trouble expressing his feelings for Jane in real life and in painting, and on the back of the canvas he wrote " I cannot paint you, but
I love you".
After this work, he decided to leave painting because this picture showed exactly where his real talent lay as a designer but not as a painter.
The Oxford experience, even if it failed, gave him the idea of a group of talented artists who joined their creativity, and this will be fundamental for his future project: the construction of his house, the Red House.
William Morris, married Jane in 1859, and chose for his home a spot of land in the village of Upton (now included in Bexleyheath), full of history as it was on the way used by pilgrims to Canterbury Cathedral, as also reported by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, one of his favourite writers.
For the work, he commissioned his friend Philip Webb for a total of £4000.
Morris and Webb travelled during the summer to France, along the Seine between Paris and Rouen to sketch medieval buildings.
For Webb, the Red House was the first real independent architect project and had to respect Morris’s wishes to create a space for his family but also for his circle of artists friends.
The result is the complex fusion of Morris' romantic utopia with Webb’s practicality, as Rossetti himself recognised: "it is more a poem than a house... but an admirable place to live in too".
Webb decided to reject the fashionable decorative and architectural style of the period of lavish stylistic revivals of different eras, and focused on what is called British vernacular architecture, a regional style based on local natural materials.
The Red House is a building that emphasises its natural materials almost as if it grown out of the landscape. Picturesque and asymmetrical, the building embodies a strong mix of traditional construction techniques and medieval style that includes red brick, sloping roof, high fireplaces and windows, and pointed window arches. The Red House also rejected Victorian conventions regarding the organization of internal space, as can be seen with its idiosyncratic layout: a two-storey, 'L-shape' that wrapped round a garden and a cone-roofed well (in effect, two sides of a medieval-style quadrangle).
Webb's building was practical and informal, and far more suitable to family life than the traditional Victorian house, giving more space to the dining room and the drawing room.
Its generous spaces are easily interconnected, creating a relaxing new version of the home space.
Morris unable to find furniture that satisfied his taste, decided to create it himself with the help of a circle of artists: Webb made the furniture and tableware in the Gothic style, Jane Morris and her sister the embroidery decorations, Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal the pictorial decorations. This artistic and creative cooperation led in 1861 to the formation of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., called 'The Firm', that established the birth of the craft design known as Art and Craft.
When you arrive at the Red House, the first thing you notice is the garden, even if the current one no longer corresponds to the design of Morris, that can be seen only in some paintings by Burne-Jones.
From the beginning of the project, Webb conceived the house in unity with the garden in an attempt to preserve the existing orchards of apples, cherries and oaks, ash trees, yews, hazelnuts and holly.
Webb created grid areas for climbing plants such as roses, jasmine and honeysuckle. Morris was very fascinated by the plants in his garden which inspired him to design his first wallpaper, titled Trellis, in 1862.
The first place that you come across when entering through the medieval style door is the Entrance Hall.
In the design of Webb and Morris, the built-in furniture contrasted with white walls and fireplaces in bare red brick. Today the walls are decorated by wallpapers by Morris added by the later owners of the house, but remains a settle-cum-cupboard realised by Webb and painted by Morris with an unfinished scene taken from Malory representative Sir Lancelot bringing Sir Tristram and the Belle Iseult Joyous Gard.
It includes the portrait of Jane on the left and Burne-Jones giving a cherry to his wife Georgiana on the right.
On the left, there is a small passage with windows decorated by Burne-Jones with the themes of Love in red and Fate in green holding the wheel of fortune, surrounded by stylised birds and flowers designed by Webb following examples from the fifteenth century. Burne-Jones’s stained glass will become a key point in the production of Morris & Co. The corridor leads to the garden porch called the Pilgrim’s Rest.
On the right, you will find the dining room with a brick fireplace decorated with blue and white Delft, tiles with traditional Dutch scenes of daily life. In the room there is a Gothic style dresser designed by Webb stained and lacquered in "dragon’s blood" red.
The staircase is the main centre of the house, illuminated from two sides by windows rising right up into the roof. The stairs are made of oak wood with tapered newel posts in a spare medieval style.
The ceiling has an innovative geometric decoration with two different patterns. In the original project, the stairs were to be painted with scenes from the Trojan Wars, never made by Burne-Jones.
On the upper floor, the most important room is the drawing room, the main hall with polygonal ceiling that was originally decorated with foliage and geometric flowers. In the middle of the room there is a huge red brick fireplace perhaps inspired by those seen in French Renaissance châteaux.
At the top of the fireplace there is the motto "Ars longa vita brevis" (Art is lasting life is short).
The furniture, that attracts attention, is a massive settle with a sideboard originally painted in burgundy which kept three cupboard doors painted by Rossetti, now preserved in various museums. The cupboard doors were wedding gifts and they depicted scenes from Dante: the central pannel Dantis Amor, The Salutation of Beatrice in Florence and The Salutation in the Garden of Eden.
On the walls, Morris commissioned Burne-Jones to paint seven frescoes based on the medieval romance of Sir Degrevaunt, published in 1844. Burne-Jones completed only three in 1860: The Wedding, the Wedding Procession, the Wedding Feast. In the last scene the bride and groom are Morris and his wife Jane.
Morrises' bedroom was the most decorated room with a blue serge tapestry embroidered by Jane and her sister Bessie, with a daisies theme taken from a medieval illumination found in the British Library.
In the room, there was a huge Chaucer wardrobe made by Webb and decorated by Burne-Jones with scenes taken from the Prioress’s Tale by Chaucer.
In 1950, were found uncovered beneath the wallpaper, fragments of frescoes attributed to Elizabeth Siddal, wife of Rossetti, painted in 1861, a year before her suicide.
After this room, passing through a corridor, there are the eye-of-the-ox windows decorated with floral themes and the motto of Morris Si je puis.
The last room, on the first floor, is a spacious and bright environment that was used by Morris as a study.
You can admire an embroidered panel depicting Aphrodite designed by Morris and probably made by his sister-in-law Bessie Burden between 1859-1866. It was one of 12 female subjects taken from Chaucer’s poem The Legend of Excellent Women, which were to decorate the dining room but were never completed.
The Red House was inhabited by the Morris family for five years, hosting a bohemian circle of artists.
Morris’s design firm was beginning to be very successful and the long journeys from Upton to London, where business and commissions were taking place, were ruining his fragile health.
In 1865, Morris abandoned the Red House, the only home he built and owned, and with this his dream of creating a community of artists living and working together, but this dream remained at the heart of the Art and Craft movement that he inspired.
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