Morris Interiors

In my talk, I'm the period that I'm looking at is the 19th century. Were still very much a farming dominated country and in a short time, 30 years, we moved from farms to factories. And as a result of that, the work of the common person changed totally. So they were involved in working factories producing more than they could ever need to sell. But as a reaction to that, we saw the richer getting very, very much richer in England, but the poorer getting very, very much poorer. And into t And the arts and crafts movement was very much a reaction to the world of the poor. It's about honesty. They saw factory made goods as dishonest, as fake, and they wanted to create objects that were truthful about handcraftsmans William Morris was celebrated for talking about the importance of beauty in the home, but beauty, not as a forcehood, but beauty derived from the objects themselves. And William Morris was incredibly influential because he brought together under the auspices of Morris and Company, a whole group of artists and designers who were living with So they shared One of the most important parts of Morris and Co and the ethos be And they were looking back to a medieval practice where people were working together to make t But they had to have a purpose, a function. So it couldn't just be that you looked at them and said, well, that's just a lovely t It had to be used for somet And I t As much as I mean in Victorian houses, it's a cold space. So you needed t And one of the t One of the key partners in Morris and Co was P So he'd worked with Morris very quickly decided that he was not going to be an arc And he asked Webb to design For P It was about consideration. It was about working with And in Stanton, w T And he found at t And he based It's a small farm building that celebrates local craft techniques, local materials. If you t When you come to Stanton, the first t And you have to go past them and through an archway and only then do you come to the entrance of the house. And it's almost as if Webb and James Beale, Margaret Beale and They wanted it to be a home. Stanton is much more about a wonderful country setting. And the way Webb designed the house was about practicality and function as well as beauty. So for example, at the heart of this building, you see the great big water tower that from a distance makes it look But in that water tower were the two massive tanks that were required to be a self-sustaining house. It provided water for was When you come to Stanton, one of the first parts of the house you see are the kitchens and the servants' quarters. He's not A lot of arc They were part of the community of the home. And as you move internally through the servants' areas of the house, they were equally decorated and celebrated as were the bedrooms and the dining rooms and the drawing rooms of the Beale family. And interestingly, in one of the main passages that leads to the kitchens and where the servants would be coming through, is one of our most important wallpapers for the Arts and Crafts movement, Trellis. Because in Trellis we see William Morris and P And stories say that Morris designed the Trellis and P So in that one piece of wallpaper we see how important t Here in the drawing room at Stanton, we can see examples of many of the different designers and artists who worked with Morris and Co. So we can see work by W. A. S. Benson, who is the very important metal worker. We can see designs by William de Morgan, who was a ceramics worker. And in both Benson and de Morgan's work, you see them learning from the past in terms of craft techniques, hammering copper, making lusterware. And Stanton is incredibly important in the T And in the lights that we see P Because what Webb was trying to do was produce designs based on natural ideas that really worked with t Also in the room we see one of the most important pieces of Morris and Co. furniture, the Morris chair. The Morris chair in itself very much typifies all the ideas we've been talking about in terms of the arts and crafts movement. So it was an object that had been found in a So they looked at a So we see objects that were designed by a n But also at the heart of our story are some very important women designers. And yet for many years they've not been seen in the For example Agnes and Rhoda Garrett. Now the Garrett cousins were incredibly important in they were part of a wider family of women that included Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Millicent Fawcett. They were the people who were doing for the first time jobs that hadn't been considered the role of a middle class person. Middle class women were meant to stay at home and their husbands wealth and success was very much identified by the fact that their women could be at home. So at Stanton we have a n These are the only objects that we know at the moment that the Garrett's design that still exists in England. I'm sure we'll find more now we'really looking for them but at the moment these are the only ones that we know. One of the interesting t One of the impacts of the Industrial Revolution was that we saw great swathes of English arc So William Morris and P William Morris was never afraid to court publicity and upset people when he was celebrating the importance of buildings of the past and he caused a lot of challenge by once describing a cow barn as beautiful as important as a cathedral and in the That was in many ways seen as an insult but what Morris was saying was in those sorts of buildings, in the farmhouses and the barns that still existed in t When I was a c I warmed to it. There was somet My uncle was the gardener here at Stanton and so throughout my c It was only when I started studying art Thank you.