Suzanne Fagence Cooper's Blog

NEW BOOK - Arts & Crafts: Ideas that Shaped the World

This month we are launching a beautifully illustrated new book with essays on the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and Scandinavia. 

It has grown out of the conversations that we had last Spring in Sweden, when a group of curators, researchers and historians gathered at the historic Engelsberg Ironworks. We wanted to highlight new research on key figures, including Ruskin, Morris and Ashbee, as well as drawing attention to women's work, with an essay by Karen Livingstone. Qaisra Khan has also contributed an article that considers the influence of Islamic art on 19th and early 20th century design. 
We have also been able to include ground-breaking studies by Elisabet Stavenow-Hidemark on the development of the Arts and Crafts Movement across Scandinavia, as well as essays on Swedish style and the Larsson family.
Together Elisabeth Svalin Gunnarsson and I have edited these articles.  It now is available to buy from Waterstones

Here is an extract from our foreword

Hand, head, heart –and hope

The Arts &Crafts Movement and its legacy. 

The Arts and Crafts Movement, in its original incarnation,ended in the dark days of 1940, when Morris and Co., the family firm, finallyclosed. With the deaths of May Morris (designer and lecturer) in 1938 and then CR Ashbee (founder of the Guild of Handicraft) in 1942, the last links with the pioneeringspirit of the movement were broken. These artists and writers had created boldnew ways of living and working in a modern world, in Britain and beyond. Whatwas their legacy in the Nuclear Age?

 

As the words and actions of William Morris and John Ruskinpassed beyond living memory and into history, the personal relationships thatshaped the Movement became public property. Houses, texts and objects were now beingstudied by curators. The things that had belonged to their families and friendsbecame institutionalised. The Arts and Crafts Movement had a domestic focus. Althoughthe artists and architects had accepted public commissions and decorated churches,more often they were working on a smaller scale. They wanted to make ‘the HouseBeautiful’, and so placed an emphasis on family spaces. As a result, theafterlife of their homes was just as important as museum publications andexhibitions in preserving the histories of the Movement.
This was the case notonly in Britain, but also in Sweden, where Carl and Karin Larsson’s family homeat Lilla Hyttnäswas opened to visitors in 1946.  

If we look at another home that was central to the ideals ofthe Movement – Kelmscott Manor - we can see how attitudes to the Arts andCrafts have ebbed and flowed. The Oxfordshire home of William Morris and hisfamily since 1871, it was neglected in the years after May Morris’s death. Thehouse was still decorated with embroideries, furniture and pictures made andcollected by her parents and their close circle when May Morris bequeathed the Manorto Oxford University. But they did not want it. After a legal squabble, it becamethe responsibility of the Society of Antiquaries.

Essential conservation work to save this ‘heaven on earth’ wasundertaken in the early 1960s. A film made at the time by architects RichardDufty and Peter Locke documented the serious structural problems they had toresolve as they tried to save the ‘many-gabled old house’. Rotting timbers, bowingwalls, unstable staircases, all had to be replaced so the building could bepreserved for the next generation. This work has recently been consolidated,and the facilities updated to make space for the growing number of visitors.The most recent intensive conservation project meant that Kelmscott Manor wasclosed for two years. It reopened in Spring 2022 with the addition of asympathetically designed new building, to welcome school groups and providefacilities for an artist in residence.  Thecurrent team have taken Morris’s own sensitivities into account. As the founderof the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, William Morris wasespecially concerned about inappropriate restoration. And his efforts to encouragearchitects to use vernacular materials and designs, to create minimal impact onolder structures, are still being maintained today by the SPAB. The Society stillsupports craftspeople and architects with Sustainable Heritage awards. Theyalso offer advice on issues like energy efficiency in historic buildings. AsMorris said, ‘we are only trustees for those that come after us’.

William Morris has been the focus of consistent popular andinstitutional interest since the 1960s. This is partly because he was involved ina wealth of different projects, from poetry to political activism. He alsoestablished an interior design brand that was recognised throughout theEnglish-speaking world.

However, his reputation has also been maintained thanksto his close and enduring relationship with London’s V&A Museum. In hislifetime, he advised the curators on their acquisitions of textiles andceramics. After the death of his daughter May, her bequests enhanced theMuseum’s collections. This meant that the V&A was able to demonstratebreadth of his work through on-going research. They staged major exhibitions onWilliam Morris in 1934 and 1996, and the International Arts and Craftsexhibition (2005) showed how far his ideas and designs were shared in the 19thcentury and since. Morris was champion of sustainability and workers’ rights, adesigner who had a profound sense of place and of history. His patterns arestill successfully marketed and repackaged for products today, although oftenthe manufacturers have lost sight of his original vision.  

 

John Ruskin’s reputation has been more vulnerable. Before theFirst World War, he was recognised as one of the most prescient and influentialthinkers of his age. But by 1969, the 150th anniversary of hisbirth, many of his opinions were unfashionable, and his watercolours were notwidely known. The collections of art, botanical and geological samples that hehad given to the city of Sheffield were mostly in store, and it looked as if thewatercolours and manuscripts held in a private collection on the Isle of Wightmight be split and sold.

Gradually the tide has turned, and the archives are nowsecure in the beautiful Ruskin Library at Lancaster University. The building, awork of art in itself, designed to resemble Ruskin’s beloved Venice, is notwithout its own difficulties. But Ruskin’s legacy has always had an impactbeyond the scholarly and institutional. 

At his home in Brantwood, the gardens are flourishing as wellas the historical collections. In Sheffield, his ideas have formed the groundwork for hands-onprojects, bringing people together from all sorts of backgrounds; bakers andbee-keepers, school children and troubled adults. One unexpected success is therevival of Ruskin Land, an area of the Wyre Forest in the Midlands. The woods,orchards, meadows and small-holdings here were given to Ruskin and hisfollowers, as a place of peace and productivity in the years before the FirstWorld War. A century later, they now provide a quiet space for young people whoneed respite from the city. Wood-working, apple-picking, listening to birdsong,these are also part of Ruskin’s gift to our modern world.

G

oing ‘Back to the Land’ has always been a part of the Artsand Crafts story. Fiona MacCarthy made it clear in her biography of C R Ashbee,when she called it ‘The Simple Life’ (1981). The pull of the countryside wasfelt so strongly by Ashbee, that he moved his workshop and colleagues out ofLondon and into the Cotswolds.  Hisdesign work, and his radical response to capitalist consumerism was charted in AlanCrawford’s study ‘C R Ashbee: Romantic Socialist’ (1985) and made visible inthe V&A’s ‘International Arts and Crafts’ exhibition. 

The V&A Museum has been central to researching anddisplaying the Arts and Crafts tradition, in the widest sense, bringing CarlLarsson to a new British audience. In 1998, they brought the furniture andtextiles of Lilla Hytnäsfrom Sundborn as the core exhibits in a special exhibition, ‘Carl and KarinLarsson: Creators of the Swedish Style’. This display and the exhibition cataloguewere also significant in reinstating Karin’s place in the story. Her designs,weavings and embroideries were recognised as dynamic and influential works intheir own right.  Increasingly, the rolesof women like Karin Larsson – as designers and makers – have been brought intoclearer focus.

No longer left on the margins, recent research has amplified thevoices of women like Jane Morris whose letters were published by Jan Marsh andFrank L Sharp (2012). The work of her daughter May, in textiles, jewellery andwallpaper design, was brought together in a substantial exhibition in 2017. AndKaren Livingstone’s recovery of the biographies of female designers and makersin ‘Women Pioneers of the Arts and Crafts Movement’ (2024) demonstrates that women’sexperience was not monolithic. These artists followed many different paths. Artsand Crafts ideals allowed them to experiment with fresh ways of making a living.

 So where does the Arts and Crafts Movement lead us now?Increasingly, it is inspiring more intangible projects, beyond the universityor the museum. There is a strong pull towards a ‘Green’ reading of William Morris.And many new readers see Ruskin as a proto-environmentalist, with his argumentsabout impact of industrial pollution in his devastating lecture on ‘The StormCloud of the Nineteenth Century’.

He encourages us to tread lightly, and yet toask hard questions about stewardship and financial transparency. Ruskin wasfierce. He was difficult. This radical edge means that his work will persist inour imaginations.   

As we look towards 2034 and the bicentenary of Morris’s birth,what remains? Is it the wallpaper, the poetry, the beautiful books? Or will itbe his urgent concerns, which we still share, about waste, or impact ofmachines on human creativity. As Morris wrote in News from Nowhere, heenvisioned a world ‘where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt’. Clearly,there is much work to be done.

 

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 Morristranscribed 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 etl’esprit hospitaliers’. This phrase, emphasising the importance of hospitality,brings into focus the concerns of this essay. 
By looking more closely at theidea of the welcoming spirit, the hospitable heart, we can reconsider JaneMorris and her role in the making of the House Beautiful in late VictorianBritain. What happens when we draw attention to creative conversations, and thenetworks formed when sharing skills, house-space and food? We can open up newways of understanding the radical nature of the Arts and Crafts movement, whenwe rethink our assumptions about domesticity and female labour. 
Many of thememories about Jane’s hospitality are set in the gardens of their first familyhome at Red House in Kent, or in the grounds of Kelmscott Manor. They are partof the rich relationship between the Arts and Crafts movement and the naturalworld. A fondness for kitchen gardens, hedgerows, orchards and wildflowermeadows underpinned William Morris’s patterns, with their lush layers ofoverlapping plant forms. His designs are replete with blossoming, fruiting,growing things. Fabrics, wallpapers and books are decorated with pomegranatesand grapes, apples and strawberries, barely contained within the borders. 
 Thisdelight in abundance relates partly to William Morris’s childhood surrounded byproductive gardens as well as the wild spaces of Epping Forest. It also derivesfrom the central text that William Morris read as a young man and reprinted forthe Kelmscott Press in 1892. John Ruskin’s chapter on ‘The Nature of Gothic’ wasdescribed by William Morris as ‘one of the very few necessary and inevitableutterances of the century…it seemed to point out a new world on which the worldshould travel’ . Ruskin suggested several key characteristics of Gothic art thatshaped 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, itwas made visible in a ‘magnificent enthusiasm…an unselfishness of sacrifice…aprofound sympathy with the fulness and wealth of the material universe…the studyof the minute and various work of Nature’ . This ‘magnificent enthusiasm’ wastranslated by William Morris into his fascination with plants, but also hisunflagging productivity as a designer and maker, and his vigorous politicalcampaigning in later life. 
 For Jane Morris, Ruskinian ‘Redundance’ took otherforms. She was supported in her lifestyle by the financial security of herhusband’s inheritance, and by the help of servants. However, her own upbringinghad been precarious, and she had only escaped poverty through her marriage. Sherecognised the privilege of having plenty – ample food, time, space, warmth. Sheresponded by making full use of the opportunities that were opened to her. Sheread widely and made music. She travelled to Italy and Egypt. She stitched vasttextiles covered with buds and blooms. She also produced feasts for family andfriends. In her home, there was an abundance of food to be shared, baskets offruit, jars of preserves and chutneys to be given away, and opportunities forcreative sociability. It is therefore worth taking time to unpick the tales ofsome of these gatherings, as they intertwined with key moments in the making ofthe Arts and Crafts movement. 
The first, and arguably most significant, was theChristening 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 thefloors; nor could Morris have endured any chair, table, sofa or bed, nor anyhangings such as were then in existence’ . William, Jane and their guests hadtransformed the empty interiors. They painted the walls, stencilled theceilings, stitched hangings and designed stained glass, choosing subjects frommedieval legends of beautiful women and merry-making.  Burne-Jones, Marriage of Sir Degrevaunt, c.1860

   There was space forvisitors, with two or three couples taking over the spare rooms and studio atweekends throughout the summer and autumn of 1860. Most of their artist friendslived in furnished rooms in London, without full kitchens. The Rossettis usuallyate out in restaurants. Emma Madox Brown felt fortunate when she could affordteenager from the workhouse to help her with the chores. Meanwhile Jane managedfour servants at Red House, who had the use of a pantry, scullery, larder, chinacloset, storerooms and a large kitchen range. It was a house made forsociability. William Morris had ordered two great trestle tables for the diningroom. A friend remembered how ‘it was the most beautiful sight in the world tosee Morris coming up from the cellar before dinner, beaming with joy, with hishands full of bottles of wine, and others tucked under his arms’ . Together Janeand William ensured that their own prosperity was shared with the other youngpeople in their circle. 
 For Jenny’s Christening, Red House was full. GeorgieBurne-Jones recalled how, late at night, she moved with Jane through thedarkened house, checking that the guests were all comfortable. They took ‘acandle to look at the beds strewn about the drawing room for the men. Swinburnehad a sofa; I think P P Marshall’s was made on the floor’ . It was Jane’s roleto be sure that everyone was well fed, and that there were blankets and pillowsfor all. She laid the groundwork to create the right conditions for goodfellowship. By bringing everyone under their roof in this open-handed way, sheand William demonstrated the possibilities of living differently. As Williamexplained, ‘the house that would please me would be some great room, where onetalked 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 andthe production of poetry, art or practical things. 
 According to William Morris’sfirst biographer, Red House had always been intended as more than ‘a place tolive in, but as a fixed centre and background for his artistic work’ . TheChristening party provided the opportunity to turn their emerging ideas aboutinterior design into something concrete. Fruitful discussions held that weekendresulted in the formation of a new business venture, Morris, Marshall, Faulknerand Company. William Morris described it to a friend as ‘the only reallyartistic firm of the kind’ . It marked a deliberate shift, from a projectintended for private amusement and personal taste, to a commercial businesssupplying decorative schemes for homes and churches. It also changed the natureof the relationships between the friends. The husbands took on paid roles withinthe new company. They met weekly in central London to discuss commissions. Thewives, including Jane, were not mentioned in the early financial accounts,although they were making embroideries for sale. And they were excluded fromformal business decisions. Georgie Burne-Jones wrote poignantly about ‘thefeeling of exile’ at this time .
  Rossetti, Jane Morris: The Gold Chain, 1868 It is notable, however, that the women in the circle maintained their owncreative conversations. They visited Red House without their husbands, spendingtime in the gardens with Jane, sharing hopes for their projects and theirpregnancies. Elizabeth Siddall worked on murals for Jane’s bedroom whileRossetti remained in London. Siddall’s death in 1862 after her child wasstillborn caused another rupture in the familiar patterns of friendship. ButGeorgie Burne-Jones carried on staying with Jane in Kent. They talked seriouslyof building an extension to Red House so that the Burne-Jones family could movethere permanently, with the two households living side by side. Philip Webb drewup the plans in 1864. However, the needs of the new business meant that theMorris family left Red House in 1865. They moved to Queen Square in the heart ofLondon, to live above the showroom and workshops. Home-life and work-life werebrought back under the same roof again. 
 Jane continued to entertain theirfriends at Queen Square. She and William hosted a memorable dinner party tocelebrate the publication of his collection of poems, The Earthly Paradise inMay 1868. The evening was delightfully stage-managed. Twenty guests sat aroundthe massive trestle table in the ‘stately five-windowed room’, filled withvisual delights: ‘the old silver and blue china…the greenish glass of delicateshapes’ that ‘gleamed like air-bubbles…and was reflected far away in the littlemirrors set into the chimney-piece’ . The poet William Allingham and FrederickEllis, Morris’s publisher, joined artist friends from the Red House days. The‘storm of talking’ carried on late into the night. Dinners like this allowedunconventional writers and painters to make connections. They also helped tocement the position of the Morris household as an embodiment of the HouseBeautiful. Their avant-garde use of antique blue and white ceramics was anessential part of the experience, but so was Jane’s presence; her distinctiveappearance as well as her skilful housekeeping. 
Other gatherings were moreinformal, but still significant in strengthening the distinctive bonhomie oftheir circle, weaving together art and fellowship in pleasing settings. In thesummers of 1876 and 1877, Jane organised holidays in Broadway Tower, a folly inthe Cotswolds. William Morris joined her, along with Georgie Burne-Jones,Cormell Price, Charley Faulkner, his sister Kate and others. The expeditionswere like camping trips, with some of the men choosing to sleep outside on thetop of the tower, and bathing there too, ‘when the wind didn’t blow the soapaway’ . Jane arrived a few days early with her daughter May to prepare thespace. She organised bedding and hampers of food, and checked supplies of waterand firewood. The other guests could enjoy impromptu picnics and long walksbecause she had thought through the domestic details. Jane created opportunitiesfor companionship. Their circle was bound together by these shared pleasures aswell as artistic ambitions. Jane recognised the need to refresh theirconnections around the table at home, or on holiday. 
 A few years later in 1880the Morris family and friends, including the potter William de Morgan, madeanother expedition, from their riverside house in Hammersmith to KelmscottManor. They travelled along the Thames, in a hired boat called the Ark which Maydescribed as ‘an insane gondola’ . On this occasion, William chose to cook forthe group, and their friend Crom Price supplied the drinks. ‘Everybodyperpetually gave orders in a very loud voice and …nobody ever paid the slightestattention to them’ ; meanwhile Jane continued working on her sewing from herplace in the stern, as the young people took turns to row. She left the party atOxford, and went ahead to Kelmscott Manor to ready the house for guests. Theothers ‘fastened a lantern to the prow’ of their boat and made their way slowlyin 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 theresolution 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’sdoing, that it required forethought and kindliness. ‘J. had lighted up allbrilliantly,’ he wrote, ‘and sweet it all looked, you may be sure’ . The houseand 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 inoverlapping sensations of warmth, light and the savour of good food. Thebeautiful woman and the House Beautiful were experienced simultaneously at theend of this journey. Jane’s presentation of Self and Home were both creativeconstructs, and had been carefully fashioned since the early days of hermarriage. They were entangled in the memories and artworks of those whoencountered Jane at home. But the labour – emotional, artistic and domestic –that sustained the idyll of Red House or Kelmscott Manor was usually overlookedand undervalued.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JANE MORRIS!

 

To celebrate the birthday of Jane Morris

To celebrate the birthday of Jane Morris (née Burden) on 19thOctober 1839, I am sharing an extract from my book, ‘How We Might Live: At Home with Jane and William Morris’. 

D G Rossetti, 'The Blue Silk Dress', 1868

We know very little about her early years, but I wanted to piece together the fragments we can glean about her life before 1857 – the unexpected memories she offers to friends; Victorian census entries; church records and maps; and my own experience of living in Holywell Street for several years.   

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It is fitting that we first see Jane clearly at the theatre. In the summer of 1857 she emerged from the shadows of her background, and became visible as a potential artist’s model. At the playhouse, Jane could immerse herself in alternative worlds, experience transformations and sudden revelations. The actresses of the Drury Lane Theatre Company on stage that night could choose how to present themselves to the audience. They could dress up, rearrange their hair, alter their posture, modulate their voice, step into the light. They could be a peasant or a princess. For a working-class girl like Jane, the theatre was full of possibilities. The story of Jane’s ‘discovery’ has been retold and romanticised many times. She is treated like a blank space, a nobody, as if she only became a fully formed person after she moved into the orbit of the artists. Very few people have tried to see the meeting from her perspective. Jane was already working, probably in domestic service, possibly for a college. She was already resourceful and imaginative. She was skilled in needlework and hungry for books.

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Bath Place now
What do we know about her background for sure? Jane was born on 19 October 1839 in St Helen’s Passage, a tiny cut-through between Holywell Street and New College Lane. She was baptised in the little church of St Peter-in-the-East in the blank days between Christmas and New Year 1840, more than a year after her birth. Maybe she was a sickly child (although parents often hastened christenings, in case the baby died). Maybe her family were not bothered about church attendance. Certainly, as an adult, Jane was not conventionally religious. Unlike Georgie Burne-Jones, for example, faith was never the bedrock of her character. Her education was rather scrappy, too. Schooling for all young children was not compulsory until the 1870, so Jane probably learnt to read and count in a school set up by a local charity or church. 

Marriage certificate of Jane's parentsHer own mother, born Ann Maizey, was illiterate. She could not write her own name when she married Robert Burden in 1833. It seems that there was no one to teach her in Alvescot, the little Oxfordshire village where she grew up. Like many young agricultural workers, she had left the land and come into town looking for work. She wanted a life that was less exposed, less hand-to-mouth. Ann’s son-in-law William Morris came to idealise the seasonal, rooted way of living that was destroyed by industry and urbanisation. But he overlooked the ignorance, the cold, the damp, the harsh grind that Ann Maizey and her generation had wanted to escape. How keenly did Jane feel this dissonance between her family’s familiarity with rural poverty, and her husband’s nostalgia for a pre-industrial idyll? 

The gap between Jane’s experience, and that of her mother, later became almost insurmountable. Jane, through her marriage, was surrounded by writers. She became steeped in the literary worlds of romance and legend. And then she was exposed to the fiery political tracts of radical thinkers. This was a way of living, creating, interacting that was unthinkable for her parents. It is perhaps Jane’s greatest achievement that she was born into a home where her mother could barely read or write, and yet she transcended these limitations magnificently. Jane grew into a woman who could converse with poets, who learnt to read Dante in Italian, and taught her own bright daughters. Georgie Burne-Jones, in her retelling of Jane’s story, wondered why she had not met William or his friends ‘during the time he was at College’. Jane was, after all, a beauty ‘of so rare and distinguished a type’ that it seemed strange that their paths had not crossed sooner. 

D G Rossetti, 'Jane Burden', 1858

Georgie of course knew the answer. But she glossed over the great social gulf between the Burdens and William’s undergraduate set. Exeter College was a five-minute walk away from Jane’s home. They could have passed each other on Broad Street or outside the Bodleian Library many times. However, their everyday lives were very different. For one thing, Jane was five years younger than William; she was only sixteen when William finished his studies. It is also worth remembering that during his time at Exeter College, he was writing, not drawing. He did not need flesh-and-blood models for his imagined heroines. William’s circle then gravitated towards a different part of the city. They spent much of their time with friends in Pembroke College, to the south of Carfax, the crossroads at the very centre of town, or they walked west across Port Meadow to the river. Jane moved through other quarters of the city, seeing it from her own angle. 

She and her family had changed lodgings several times in her short life, but always within the same limited area. Her home now was wedged in Brooks’ Yard behind 65 Holywell Street. For a few years, they had lived on the other side of the road in King’s Head Passage, down a tight entry beside a pub. When she was little, their home had been in Brazier’s Yard, in a row of buildings backing onto 23 Holywell Street. Her childhood was unsettled, punctuated by these moves. They never shifted more than a hundred yards or so. And they always lived in the crowded courtyards hidden behind the elegant Georgian façades of Holywell Street. A short walk to the north brought Jane to open ground. Beyond Wadham College were meadows and grazing land for sheep and cattle, but these were gradually enclosed and landscaped, to become the University Parks in the early 1850s. From the other end of the street, she could reach Holywell church and the watermill, and then open fields. She sometimes walked across Magdalen Bridge to the woods beyond the Iffley Road, and came home with handfuls of violets. As a girl, these were her breathing spaces, away from the cottage, where she was hemmed in on all sides. 

Oxford, 'Holywell Street & New College', 1850

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Why did they live in such tucked-away places? The Burdens were poor, and it is likely that their lodgings were connected to her father’s job. Many of their neighbours in St Helen’s Passage were college servants, or their dependants  – a porter from Brasenose College lived there, next to a laundress and a gardener’s widow. In the houses around them were carpenters, seamstresses and college cooks. When they moved up the road, they lived among charwomen, manglewomen and labourers. Jane’s father was listed on his marriage certificate and in the 1861 census as an ostler or groom. He may have worked in the livery stables at Number 7 or Number 14 Holywell Street. We can still see the great wooden gates that once opened onto the busy yards, where Burden and the other men prepared the horses for their exercise. Or he could have been employed in the stables attached to New College. Perhaps if William Morris and his friends had been keen on hunting, and kept horses in town, they might have seen Jane sooner. As it was, she went unremarked, as she stopped by the stables to bring her father his dinner. 

The barns and coach houses at New College were cleared in the 1870s to make way for the expansion of the college accommodation. The whole area around Jane’s home was transformed then, with much of the medieval layout swept away. The stables had been built in the ancient moat, known locally as The Slype, beneath the city wall. An Ordnance Survey map of 1876 shows how the old buildings curved round the bastion, and clung to the medieval stonework. Between the stables and Holywell Street was a stonemason’s yard and large domestic gardens, filled with fruit trees. All these were lost too, as New College extended beyond the wall, creating a new range of Gothic Revival buildings and an imposing gateway and lodge. 

Holywell Street, The Slype & old city walls

But in Jane’s childhood, her family lived and worked in a jumble of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses and cottages, interspersed with pubs like the King’s Head and the Golden Ball (also demolished in the 1870s). Only the King’s Arms and the Turf Tavern survived.

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Sitting in the tiny beer garden of the Turf today, it is still possible to get a sense of the cheek-by-jowl environment in which Jane grew up. Like the college stables, the pub was built in the old moat, close against the city wall. The houses lean in, limiting the light. St Helen’s Passage twists and kinks. There is little privacy. In the 1840 and ’50s, the pale roughcast on the walls was blackened by smoke from the cooking ranges. Jane’s mother is said to have worked as a laundress, but it is hard to imagine that she could have washed and dried linen at home – the soot and smells were inescapable. The family shared a water supply and a privy. (Some houses in this lane did not have indoor bathrooms fitted until the early 1970s.) 

William Morris, embroidery design, c.1862Wet washing, noise from the pubs and workshops, dogs, children, hens, and not a breath of air: this was the scene outside Jane’s front door. It was the same from St Helen’s Passage to Brazier’s Yard. Brooks’ Yard was owned by a dairyman. So, in 1857 Jane could have woken to the clatter of metal churns and milk carts, and the smell of cows and curdling cream. Inside the cottage was no better. She would have shared a room, and probably a bed, with her sister. Space was tight. The rooms were dark. It was a struggle to keep clean, to tame her wild hair, to find money for a shawl or dress fabric. Home was stifling, especially in high summer. 

There were outbreaks of cholera in the Long Vacations in the early 1830s and again in 1849 and 1854. Dr Acland’s map of Oxford, showing the locations of the cholera outbreaks, indicated that most cases were on the other side of the city, in the parishes of St Ebbe’s and St Thomas. These were labelled as ‘districts still undrained’ with ‘parts of the river still contaminated by sewers’. However, there were several reported deaths in Holywell Street and New College Lane. Anxieties about disease and the safety of drinking water were heightened again in 1857, when the Illustrated London News printed illustrations of magnified drops of water. These pictures made visible dozens of microscopic creatures, with tentacles and whiskers, that lived in streams and ponds. This was more evidence of the ‘very offensive and unwholesome state’ of urban waterways. 

For Jane and her family, these worries were hard to ignore. Ill-health and early death had come close to home. Jane had watched her big sister Mary Anne die of tuberculosis in 1849. Mary Anne was only fourteen when she succumbed to ‘consumption’. There was nothing that Ann Burden could do, as her young daughter began to lose weight, to cough blood. They tried to ease her night fevers. But the disease was deadly, untreatable and easily spread. We can imagine Jane, at nine years old, scared for her older sister, and trying to keep little Bessie out from under her mother’s feet. Jane was all too aware of the fears about paying the doctor’s bills, the waiting, the struggles to make sure there was a meal on the table when the men came home from work. William, her brother, was only twelve but would also have been out working also as a messenger boy. It was Jane’s job to run errands, or fetch groceries from the covered market. 

Her father had an unpredictable temper. We know that in 1837, before Jane was born, he had been fined for assaulting a neighbour. It must have been more than just an exchange of sharp words, because the woman had reported him to the police. This was part of the background noise of her early life: Jane and her mother had to keep her father in good humour as they faced the difficulties of looking after a sick child, and trying to manage a household on a very small income. From a young age, Jane was learning how to cook, clean, sew, budget, shop, care for her sister, dodge her father, and make herself useful. It would have been hard to fit in schoolwork and friendships too. But she said later that she always loved to read. She craved stories and news from the wider world. As Jane wrote in the 1870s, ‘I still keep up my old habit of reading every scrap that comes my way.’ 

D G Rossetti, 'Jane Reading', c.1870

In the very few memories she shared of her childhood, there are these hints, these quick glances beyond her immediate poverty. She remembered standing on Hythe Bridge, overlooking the canal, and watching the boats casting off and leaving the city behind. She told Crom Price how ‘I always thought when I was a little girl in Oxford how much I should enjoy a voyage on one of those barges . . . but it seemed like a dream I should never be able to realise.’ In 1879, when she wrote this letter, they were planning an excursion along the river, and at last, ‘the thing is within one’s grasp.’ She added, ‘Crom, it must be a barge but not a very coaly one.’ This comment seems to sum Jane up – her hope and imagination tempered by practicalities. Like William, she knew that the ‘embodiment of dreams’ required a balance between the visionary and the realistic.

*

Jane and May's recipe folder
To commemorate Jane and her fabled hospitality at Red House and Kelmscott Manor, we are encouraging people to bake a #cakeforJaneMorris over the next few days. I was extremely fortunate to be able to transcribe the recipes from her folder, now kept at Kelmscott. 

These include notes made by May and friends of the family. Jan Marsh, for example, has identified 'Ada' who contributed a lemony fruit cake as Ada Culmer - she was Jenny's carer and companion. Other recipes reflect their travels - in Iceland and in Italy, for example. They are all published, for the first time, in 'How We Might Live'.  (To buy 'How We Might Live' )    

New book - How we might live: At Home with Jane and William Morris

 

D.G. Rossetti, 'The Blue Silk Dress'

'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.’

William Morris – poet, designer, campaigner, hero of the Arts & Crafts movement – was a giant of the Victorian age. His beautiful creations and radical philosophies are still with us today: but his wife Jane is too often relegated to a footnote, an artist’s model given no history or personality of her own. In truth, Jane and William’s partnership was the central collaboration of both their lives. Together they overturned conventional distinctions between work and play, public and private spaces, women and men, even the Victorian class structure. 

At every stage, Jane was transformative, hospitable and engaged. The homes they made together – at Red House, Kelmscott Manor and their houses in London – were works of art, and the great labour of their lives was life itself. Through their houses, their friendships and their creations, they experimented with fruitful ways of living and working. They show us how we might enjoy lives filled with hope and beauty.

In 'How We Might Live', I explore the lives and legacies of Jane and William Morris, finally giving Jane’s work the attention she deserves and taking us inside two lives of unparalleled integrity and artistry.

As William said, 'The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.'

Meditation on silver: photographs & chains

A series of works by Kasia Wozniak & Lucie Gledhill

Take rainwater, silver and lavender oil.

Watch the dissolving links of a moon-bright chain.

Anoint a pane of glass in a darkened room.

Transmute metal into whispered images reflected in a mirror.

 

The work created by Gledhill and Wozniak is poised between alchemy and craft.  Their projects, titled SWAP, were produced for COLLECT 2020. 

They are intimately linked as the artists explore the possibilities of silver in various states - as solid or liquid, collected as crystals or swirled on photo-sensitive plates.  They question the constraints of contemporary jewellery-making and photography, while using 19th century processes as their starting point. 

Their approach chimes with John Ruskin’s insistence that ‘all art worthy of the name is the energy…[of] good craftsmanship and work of the fingers, joined with good emotion and work of the heart.’

Silver is transformed, by sunlight and by flame. Control and patience are made visible as metal reacts on the photographic plate, as it is heated and formed, as it twists against a neighbouring link. Gledhill’s curb chains connect back to their use as Victorian horse-bits and watchchains – their twisted links meant that they would lie flat. Traditionally, they were designed to keep things from wandering away, from being lost. In Gledhill’s reworking, her curb chains can be uneven, disorderly, and elements are deliberately lost in her partnership with Wozniak’s practice.

The chains are soldered, shaped and bathed. They re-emerge in Wozniak’s photographs as the subject of a picture. But they also create the essential raw material – the silver nitrate – to make that photographic image. The artworks no longer exist independently. They are interlinked. 

For each work, Gledhill experiments with submerging her chains in a tank of nitric acid. The acid reacts with silver, but leaves gold intact. Sometimes the solder is left, sometimes the gold skin. The acid becomes saturated with the precious metal. As it evaporates, a single crystal forms, and suddenly, there is a mass of pure white flakes, like sea salt.  Wozniak uses these crystals and the necklace to make a photograph. Her techniques, like Gledhill’s, are also derived from Victorian examples, outlined in The Silver Sunbeam (a ‘Practical and Theoretical Textbook on Sun Drawing and Photographic Printing’) published in 1864. She works with the wet collodion process, and a large format Gandolfi camera. This beautiful camera, built of mahogany and brass, with a distinctive pleated accordion body, is hard to date. But the Gandolfi family used the same production methods from the 1890s to 1982, when the last of the brothers retired, and their Peckham workshop closed. For SWAP, Wozniak has used 10 x 8” glass plates for her photographs and mirrors, alongside hand-poured blue glass from one of the few traditional makers still in Poland.

Wozniak chooses sitters who do not conform to mass-produced ideas of beauty. She pictures the curb chain, with its erosions and imperfections, on the bare skin of her model.  We are made aware of its weight, and the sensation of touch; metal against collarbone.

And the silver, in its new incarnation on the photographic plate, captures the image of the links. Sometimes this is through the camera’s lens. Sometimes it is as a photogram, made by direct contact of the necklace on sensitised glass. Then Wozniak uses the silver to coat another plate, making a mirror that will tarnish over time. The handmade mirror draws attention to the leading themes of these projects - of seeing in a different light or from a different angle, of delighting in the analogue and the accidental.  It also reminds us of the essential power of photography, its ability to double and therefore to disrupt. Rosalind Krauss’s description of photography being ‘the mirror with a memory’ seems particularly apt when looking at these works.

The works, with their deliberate blemishes, reinforces our understanding of the difficulties of creating a pristine image. And they remind us of Barthes’s insistence on the photograph as ‘mortal: like a living organism it is born on the level of sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages.’

Gledhill and Wozniak use the interplay between their works, the elements they share, to reshape our understanding of where one piece ends and another begins. Walter Pater once suggested that this sharing or overlapping was a virtue of the most pleasing and radical works of art. He offered a vision of the arts ‘lending each other new forces.’

At Home with Jane & William Morris

William Morris wrote:
'The secret of true happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life'.



My new book, 'At Home with Jane & William Morris' (Quercus, 2021) looks at the houses and works of art that Jane and William made together throughout their lives. 
From the Red House to Kelmscott Manor and Hammersmith, it explores the pioneering life they embraced with their artist friends. 
My research draws on newly-revealed letters from Jane to a wide range of correspondents - poets, radical thinkers, makers - as well as the intimate hand-made books she crafted. These fresh sources will be woven together with analysis of the diaries, furniture, wall-hangings and buildings that have been left to us.

I hope, through this joint biography of an extraordinary couple, to draw out the deeper story of the things and places that mattered to both Jane and William. They shaped our understanding of home as a creative space, inspiring many in the Arts and Crafts movement.
And their ideas still resonate, through their hopes for holistic living, bringing the house, garden and local environment into closer balance.

Here is a small taste of the book - as Edward and Georgie Burne-Jones, Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal visit the Morris's new home at the Red House for the first time:

  1860: The Red House
William Morris & Philip Webb, 'Rose Trellis'
design for wallpaper, William Morris GalleryThe friends arrived at the country station: ‘a thin fresh air full of sweet smells met us as we walked down the platform’. Then ‘a swinging drive of three miles of winding road’ until they reached the garden gate. A path through the orchard, and there, beyond the trellis of climbing roses, they could ‘see the tall figure of a girl standing alone in the porch to receive us.’
 William Morris, 'Flamma Troiae'
design for embroidery, 1860     Jane Morris welcomed the young couples to her home.  She was only twenty years old herself, and mistress of a fine newly-built house. Every detail of construction, from the well and the wagonette that fetched their guests from the station, to the door-handles and dog-kennel, were designed for William and Jane by their friend Philip Webb.   The Red House, Bexley Heath,
designed by Philip Webb, 1859-60
 The Red House was both a ‘Palace of Art’ and a convivial home, built for long weekends of talking and painting, stitching and writing. Here Jane and William could experiment with new ways of living. The sun seemed to shine on them. They played bowls on the lawn, or gathered apples, or shared plans for their next decorating project. The Morrises filled their spare rooms with artists and poets, who relished these visits as an escape from their own grey sooty London apartments. Georgie Burne-Jones remembered ‘the joys of those Saturdays to Mondays at Red House!...No protestations – only certainty of contentment in each other’s society. We laughed because we were happy.’
William Morris, 'Si Je Puis', stained glass designFor a few brief years, their home was the hub of a new movement in art and collaborative labour. Many of the later works created by the Morrises and their friends can be traced back to these days. They had time and space to think through their ideals, reimagining textiles, stained glass, painted furniture, wall-coverings, story-telling and hospitality.

 William Morris, 'La Belle iseult',
1858,TateMany of these projects drew on the colour and strangeness of the Gothic world, as Webb had done in his plans for the Red  House. But the house was no mock-medieval construction. Webb was not interested in embellishing his building with unnecessary details like lancet windows or archaic carving. Instead, it seemed to grow from the ground up. The Red House felt organic, fit for its setting among the apple trees. It was loved by Jane and William. Their two girls were born here. And when they had to sell up, moving back to central London in 1865, they left many of their works of art here – painted on the walls and built-in cupboards. They abandoned the massive chairs, too big for a London townhouse, and the stained glass panels in the passageway. Jane and William never went back. As Georgie wrote, years later: ‘When we turned to look around us something was gone, something had been left behind – and it was our first youth’.
 

Stones & Lilies: Ruskin's legacy since 1969

At the recent National Gallery conference on John Ruskin (20th/21st Sept 2019), I gave a paper on 'Stones & Lilies: Ruskin's legacy since 1969'. 

'Treasure of Dust' display, Brantwood
This talk drew on my interviews with many people involved in preserving and extending Ruskin's work, and coincided with the launch of my book on 'The Ruskin Revival: 1969-2019' https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-ruskin-revival/suzanne-fagence-cooper/robert-hewison/9781843681823
The Guild of St George, together with the organisers of the conference, Susanna Avery-Quash and Janet Barnes, were able to record several of the lectures, including mine. For the full set of videos, please see the Guild's website: https://www.guildofstgeorge.org.uk/resources/media/video-gallery

I was able to share some of the latest news about Ruskin's own geology collection, that has recently returned to his home in Brantwood - his own 'stones'.

'Snakeshead fritillary'
by John Ruskin, Ashmolean Museum And I explored the role of nurturing and growing, which was always at the heart of Ruskin's thinking. So my talk considered the wayside flowers of 'Proserpina', alongside the influence of the institutions, the fixtures, the relics, of his legacy.
In particular, I was able to acknowledge the remarkable contribution of women as well as men in the growth of 'Ruskin Studies' since the last big commemorations in 2000.
Opening of 'Art and Wonder'
exhibition, Sheffield

It is a testament to the transformative writings and images produced by Ruskin, that so many women have been encouraged to develop their own skills and share their love of history, nature, art and well-being.

So here is my lecture in full:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF3MHugGR5U

I hope you enjoy it.

Ruskin200 events & 'The Ruskin Revival'

Autumn 2019 - new book and talks


In the years since John Ruskin’s death in 1900, his reputation has ebbed and flowed. In his own day, he was revered as a pioneering art critic - champion of J M W Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites – as well as an artist, educator and campaigner.  However, by the mid-20th century, his views seemed outmoded, relegated to the footnotes of historical debate.
The Ruskin Revival: 1969-2019 considers the re-engagement with his radical world-view. Beginning with a conference held in 1969 at Ruskin’s last home, Brantwood in the Lake District, this study shows the range of Ruskin’s legacies. It charts the renewed fascination with his biography, as well as Ruskin’s role in reshaping discussions about the environment, criticism and arts education.
It also documents the afterlife of Ruskin’s letters and paintings, through exhibitions and catalogues. The struggle to secure his inheritance – both his archive in the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University, and his home at Brantwood – makes a fitting last chapter to the tale.
Whether we see him as a prophet, teacher, philanthropist or artist, Ruskin’s life and work seem to have become more urgent, 200 years after his birth.    This Autumn, I will be commemorating this anniversary with a new book, launched at the National Gallery, as part of the conference, Art for the Nation: John Ruskin, Art Education and Social Change : https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/events/art-for-the-nation-john-ruskin-art-education-and-social-change
Frederick Hollyer, John Ruskin at home in Brantwood, 1894, V&A
I will also speaking at literary festivals during the Autumn, about Ruskin and his legacy.

19th Sept: Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival https://budlitfest.org.uk/2019-literary-festival-dr-suzanne-fagence-cooper/

and then later that day, 19th Sept: Holy Trinity Arts & Crafts Festival, Sloane Street: https://www.holytrinityartsandcrafts.org/
27th Sept: Lincoln Book Festival: https://www.lincolnbookfestival.org/festival-programme/madly-badly-critically-romantic/

1st October: Wigtown Book Festival: https://www.wigtownbookfestival.com/programme/event/428239507/

11th October: Cheltenham Literature Festival: https://www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/literature/whats-on/2019/l235-why-ruskin-matters/

13th October: Ilkley Literature Festival: http://www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk/events/65-suzanne-fagence-cooper-why-ruskin-matters

18th October: Buxton, The Ruskin Debate, https://buxtonoperahouse.org.uk/event/the-ruskin-debate

12th November, Friends of Ruskin Park, Denmark Hill, https://www.friendsofruskinpark.org.uk/event/why-ruskin-matters/

John Ruskin, Kingfisher, 1845-75

I am also lecturing for Arts Societies in Rugby, Harrogate, Canterbury, Cavendish, Borders, Saltaire, Lincoln, Windsor & Leeds. Please see their local websites for more details.

And I will be speaking at the conference at York University on Pre-Raphaelite Sisters, 12-13th December: https://prsistersconference.home.blog/

Celebrating Ruskin's birthday - Fri 8th Feb - and Spring lecture dates

John Ruskin’s 200th birthday This week historians, artists, writers, friends will all be gathering to enthuse about the revelatory art and life of John Ruskin.

Born on 8th Feb 1819, Ruskin influenced his own generation of Victorian visionaries – and his voice continues to be heard in the 21st century. He guides us towards closer looking, more vivid insights, as we study the details of the natural world, or the beauty of art and buildings. He opens our eyes to questions of climate change, mental fragility, work, love, loss.
I have been privileged to work intimately with his letters, essays and pictures, as Research Curator at York Art Gallery for our forthcoming exhibition ‘Ruskin, Turner & the Storm Cloud’.


I have also been able to write about my own responses to his ideas in my new book, ‘To See Clearly: Why Ruskin Matters’. Miraculously, my super-sensitive publishers at Quercus have managed to get it printed in time for the birthday celebrations on Friday.
I will be speaking about Ruskin at events around the country this Spring. Many of these are already listed on the Ruskin200 website (a great resource for anyone interested in the wealth of activities this year.)To order from Waterstones
    Please do join me at one of these events. For Arts Society lectures, you will need to contact the local Society about guest access.
Mon 18 Feb       National Gallery London                            lunchtime talk   free                      1pmmore information
Thurs 21 Feb      Kenwood House (Arts Society)                 lecture on Edward Burne-Jones
Fri 15 March      Words by the Water, Keswick                   talk                                                  4pmfull programme details
Wed 20 March  Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester        Ruskin Matters symposium        1pmfull programme details
Mon 8th April     Art Fund at Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House                                    11.30   
Thur 2nd May     Sheffield Central Library                            evening talk                                    7pm
Wed 8th May      Ebor Arts Society, York                              lecture on Ruskin & Turner          6.30pm
Mon 20th May    York Art Gallery symposium                     Ruskin, Turner & the Storm Cloud
Wed 22nd May   York Art Gallery                                            Curator talk                                     12.30pm
Thurs 6th June    York Art Gallery                                            Curator talk                                     12.30pm
Tues 11th June   Cobham & Oxshott Arts Society                lecture on Ruskin & Turner          2.30pm
Sun 16th June     York Festival of Ideas                                  Arts, Science & Religion day      
 
And looking ahead to the Autumn
Sat 21st Sept       National Gallery conference on Ruskin: ‘Art for the Nation’full programme information
Thur 26th Sept    Rugby Arts Society                                       lecture on Ruskin & Turner 
Wed 16th Oct     Canterbury Arts Society                              lecture on Ruskin & Turner
Tues 22nd Oct     Cavendish Arts Society (Buxton)               lecture on Effie Gray, Ruskin & Millais
Tues 5th Nov       Borders Arts Society                                    lecture on Ruskin & Turner
Wed 6th Nov       Saltaire Arts Society                                    lecture on Ruskin & Turner 

Herkomer, John Ruskin, 1879, NPGWhat can we learn from Jo...

Herkomer, John Ruskin, 1879, NPGWhat can we learn from John Ruskin,
200 years after his birth?
In 2019, curators, writers and artists are responding to his legacy, through exhibitions, books and new works of art, as we show why Ruskin matters.
I have been reading his articles, admiring his drawings, and exploring Oxford, Sheffield and Chartres, Venice and Florence with Ruskin in mind, since I was teenager. Now I am Research Curator for a major exhibition, ‘Ruskin, Turner & the Storm Cloud’ in York and Kendal, opening in March 2019.  John Ruskin, Capital of a Loggia, Venice, Lakeland ArtsThis exhibition brings together dozens of watercolours and drawings by Ruskin and Turner, the artist who inspired him to draw and to write.  Using Ruskin’s 1884 lecture on ‘The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’, we are developing his themes of climate change and mental turbulence, to offer new ways of looking at and through Ruskin. 
J M W Turner, Figures in a Storm, TateThese include specially commissioned watercolours and cyanotypes by Emma Stibbon RA, who has followed in Ruskin’s footsteps, to record the retreat of his beloved glaciers around Mont Blanc.



Alongside the exhibition, I have been drawing together my own responses to Ruskin, as an introduction to his life and work, in
‘To See Clearly: Why Ruskin Matters’. John Ruskin, Tomb of Ilaria del Caretto: Lucca, AshmoleanJohn Ruskin, View from my window, Mornex, Lakeland ArtsIn our age of immediacy, I find this visionary Victorian artist and critic inspires us to look and to linger. Fierce and encouraging, Ruskin's writings transform our sense of connection to the built environment and the natural world.



Ruskin imagines new ways for ‘hand, head and heart’ to work together.  He teaches us that buildings tell stories; how to travel with more care; the need to respond to our own mental fragility, and to the anxieties of others.  Ruskin tells us how to work more effectively, and more fairly.  Above all he challenges us to keep learning, in small ways and in great.

Ruskin guides our focus from the smallest scale, the intense blue petal of a gentian flower, to the colossal: an Alp, a Gothic cathedral, the flight of an eagle across a continent.  With our eyes opened by John Ruskin, we can see more clearly how to take responsibility for our interconnected world.
To pre-order 'To See Clearly: Why Ruskin Matters', from Waterstones, click: https://www.waterstones.com/book/to-see-clearly/suzanne-fagence-cooper/9781787476981
John Ruskin, Gryphon: Duomo, Verona, Ashmolean