Archives: Persephone Post

Just reading about Fanny Cornforth (1835-1909) is a novel in itself. Her life is very well outlined here, by the Steyning Museum, which has been the keeper of her flame. And here is a good article in the Guardian about the chance that led to the discovery of her final days. Her biographer says: ‘Fanny is the patron saint of overlooked women. She is in the background of so many stories about other people, and she seemed finally to have vanished without trace into the shadows. But she had her good times, and she had her spirit.’

On the Post this week: the five Pre-Raphaelite women painters – featured in Pre-Raphaelite Sisters: Models, Artists, Muses at the National Portrait Gallery – of whom, shamefully, we have never heard. First, Marie Spartali Stillman (1844-1927). Here is an excellent piece about her in The New Criterion and this is Love’s Messenger, an 1885 watercolour which is now in Delaware. ‘It is a “problem picture,” an implied story of hints and missed details. The model for this painting was Spartali Stillman’s daughter Euphrosyne “Effie” Stillman who, by going on to study at the Slade under Alphonse Legros and exhibit as a sculptor at the Royal Academy, inherited her mother’s talent as well as her predicament.’

So now we now have come full circle, wondering if May Morris (1862-1938) and Karin Larsson (1859-1928) might ever have met, might have been friends indeed? This is unlikely, but there are many people who might be able to tell us and we shall ask Jan Marsh who has curated the exhibition Pre-Raphaelite Sisters: Models, Artists, Muses for the National Portrait Gallery, London which opened yesterday. This ‘explores the overlooked contribution of twelve women to this iconic artistic movement and reveals the women behind the pictures and their creative roles in Pre-Raphaelite’s successive phases between 1850 and 1900: Joanna Wells, Fanny Cornforth, Marie Spartali Stillman, Evelyn de Morgan, Christina Rossetti, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Effie Millais, Elizabeth Siddal, Maria Zambaco, Jane Morris, Annie Miller, Fanny Eaton.’ Five will be on the Post next week. Meanwhile we shall ask Jan Marsh about May and Karin…

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Chief among the keepers of the shrines to William Morris  was his younger daughter May, who not only followed her father into socialism but who took up, and in some areas surpassed, his own expertise in textiles’ (Fiona MacCarthy). Here she is in the Tapestry Room at Kelmscott Manor painted by Mary Sloane c. 1910.

T J Cobden-Sanderson the bookbinder and printer was another gentleman craftsman to emerge from within the Morris circle. Indeed it was Jane Morris who first suggested bookbinding to Cobden-Sanderson who was then drifting in career terms as a barrister.

Vase and cover painted in lustre 1888-98 by William de Morgan, one of the ‘gentlemanly artisans’ whom Morris supported and encouraged. ‘His outpouring of bowls, vases, dishes, with their enamel underglaze, lustre glazes and ebullient decoration of birds, fish and mythic creatures, were not only the most strangely endearing of that period’s pottery, they were also the most technically brilliant’ (Fiona MacCarthy).

Jane Morris as La Belle Iseult 1858 is the only completed easel painting that William Morris produced. It is a portrait in medieval dress of Jane Burden, whom Morris married in April 1859. Bearing in mind that in 1880 Morris said famously, ‘Have nothing in our houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful’, this painting is particularly fascinating because it so messy! Iseult appears to have recently arisen from her bed, where a small greyhound lies curled up among the crumpled sheets.Many of the furnishings such as the Turkish rug, Persian embroidered cover and whitework hangings on the bed were probably in Morris’s personal collection.

Influenced by William Morris’s ideals and aesthetic, this chair was first made by Phillip Clissett, a chair-maker from Herefordshire, in 1888. It was used to furnish the Meeting Room of the Art Workers Guild in London.  We have one in the office, bought when the Art Workers had a fund-raising sale. Do ask to sit on it next time you are in the shop! On the Post next week: other designs which were influenced by William Morris.

‘The exhibition uses Morris’s key principles of Unity, Craft, Simplicity and Community as a lens to explore the early years of the Bauhaus… (which) embraced a diverse range of ideas and aesthetics as it adopted and adapted the messages of the Arts and Crafts movement in its quest to design a better world.’ This is the Glass Painting workshop in Weimar in 1923.

The exhibition at the William Morris Gallery (which opens next week, details here) will put this 1923 Marcel Breuer chair beside yesterday’s Morris table and says that it is similarly ‘simple bits of wood put together in an interesting way.’ Some of us would find the comparison between Morris and Bauhaus a bit tenuous, but it’s thought-provoking.