Morris & Company Anemone

"Anemone" is the largest print in my new Morris & Company collection.

It comes in six colorways in this line.

It represents a new direction for the firm of Morris & Company as designer John Henry Dearle took over the artistic management in the late 1890s. The Arts & Crafts aesthetic developed by William Morris had evolved into Art Nouveau with sinuous lines, stylized florals and a flatter look. 

Dearle was born in 1860, the year before William Morris designed his first textile. As the younger generation, he adapted the end-of-the-century style to Morris design. This particular print was drawn for wall paper and seems to be the perfect wall-covering for the Edwardian home.

It makes a great fabric too.

I notice that I have put a date of 1876 on the selvage edge of this print.

It can't be! Dearle was 16 and Art Nouveau was still in the future in 1876.

I can't actually find a specific date for this design in my notes but I am thinking I meant 1896, the year Dearle took over as Director of the firm.

So let's say late 1890s.

Take a marker and change that 7 in the selvage to a 9 when you get your fabric.

It makes a great border as in this project from Moda

And this one from Planted Seed.

See these designs in the PDF you can download at Moda

http://www.unitednotions.com/fcc_morris_and_company.pdf  

5 Yards in a Stickley Morris chair

Michele Hill's More William Morris Applique

Michele Hill's second book on William Morris applique is out!

Here's the cover quilt Morning Glory.

She certainly made good use of the reds in The Morris Workshop line.

The border, featured on the cover, uses the Iris print

by John Dearle from that 2010 Morris Workshop collection for Moda.

Read more about the print here at my blog post

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2009/09/morris-workshop-designers.html

Thanks, Michele.

The subtitle is

"Spectacular Quilts and Accesories for the Home"

Here's a specatacular quilt

Floral Fantasy.

Not in the usual Wm. Morris range

And some accessories Willie woulda loved

Journals

See Michele's blog

William Morris and Michele

http://williammorrisandmichele.blogspot.com/

She has information about her fabrics and publications.

The new book is Australian so it will be awhile before

 it's at your local quiltshop if you're in another hemisphere.

Keep checking

and ask your quilt shop owner to check with her usual distributors.

Here's Michele's first book.

My current William Morris reproduction collection in shops now is A Morris Tapestry.

http://www.unitednotions.com/fcc_a_morris_tapestry.pdf

J.H. Dearle's Daffodil

Daffodil from my new Moda collection

A Morris Tapestry

Damask Black Colorway

As William Morris aged he turned over the supervision of Morris and Company to John Henry Dearle (1860-1932), known as Henry. Dearle had begun as a showroom assistant when he was an 18 year-old art student and graduated to designer. After Morris's death in 1896 he became Art Director. Linda Parry, the expert on Morris design, has counted 25 Dearle designs in repeating textiles (Morris did 36).*

Morris's Wey design, also in A Morris Tapestry

For his early designs Dearle tended to copy flowers and leaves from Morris's patterns, combining them in new repeat, not much different from Morris's characteristic designs. He gradually developed his own style, typified by Daffodil from 1891. Morris had often used a diagonal set to his florals, but Dearle alternated the flowers here with a bold vertical stripe.

We've done the Daffodil print in seven colorway,

above Wardle's Sky Blue and Fennel Green, left and center.

Morris's line is often subtle; in this piece the stripe dominates.

An original print or document print

Morris would not have used the bright pinks, blacks and bitter yellows in this version of Henry Dearle's Daffodil. As the Arts and Crafts Movement style evolved into Art Nouveau unusual color combinations obtainable with synthetic dyes became the fashion.

Dearle adapted Morris's emphasis on nature to new Art Nouveau sensibilities and color. The block print for Daffodil required ten blocks for the color combinations, which came from synthetic dyes. Dearle understood the changing direction of the Arts and Crafts movement. His Daffodil design for wallpaper and print was one of the firm's most popular sellers.

Poster by Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939).

Mucha, Henry Dearle's contemporary, 

pushed Art Nouveau principles

 and color to create a popular style. 

Prints were one facet of Henry Dearle's interests. He also designed carpets, tapestries and embroideries as well as stained glass. His son Duncan W. Dearle (1893-1954) specialized in glass and when Henry died on January 15, 1932, Duncan took over the firm. But by the 1930s modernism ruled and the Morris firm went into decline, going into liquidation in 1940.

See more of Dearle's work by searching for "Dearle" on the search page of the Victoria and Albert Museum's website. Click here:
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/

And see an earlier post about him by clicking here:
http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2009/09/morris-workshop-designers.html

The Textile Blog has a post about his tapestries
http://thetextileblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/later-tapestry-work-of-john-henry.html

*Linda Parry, William Morris Textiles, Viking Press, New York, 1983. There is a picture of Henry Dearle on page 70, a sketch showing him looking exactly like an Edwardian gentleman who lived into the modern age.

Tapestry

Summer, detail from The Orchards; The Seasons

I named my reproduction collection that will be in quilt shops soon

 A Morris Tapestry.

Prints from A Morris Tapestry in the Damask Black colorway

My inspiration was William Morris's revival of woven tapestry technique in 19th-century England. Morris (1834–1896) looked for a return to handcraft during the industrial age. He viewed printed fabrics as mass-produced alternatives to hand-produced patterning. Impressed by the rediscovery of the wool, silk and gold tapestries of the Middle Ages, Morris and his fellow craftsmen staged a revival of the art of woven pictorials at his Merton Abbey workshop.

The Orchards; The Seasons, about 1890

Designed by William Morris and John Henry Dearle

Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Click here to see more:

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O72515/tapestry-the-orchard-the-seasons/

Morris's inspiration were the huge pictorial hangings commissioned by European nobility. Above is a 15th century tapesty, a panel from the Unicorn Tapestries woven in the Netherlands. The Unicorn Is Found at the Fountain was made between 1495–1505, and is 12 feet tall. The series was given to The Metropolitan Museum of Art by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1937.

A panel from another medieval woven tapestry featuring unicorns. The Lady and the Unicorn series is now in the French Museum Musée du Moyen Age. 

Discovery of the decaying Lady and Unicorn tapestries in a neglected French estate in 1841 contributed to the popular appreciation of the old-fashioned art of loom-woven pattern.

Detail of the Woodpecker Tapestry designed by William Morris.

1885

Click here for more information on the Woodpecker Tapestry

at the Textile Blog, which has numerous posts about Morris tapestries.

http://thetextileblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/william-morris-and-woodpecker-tapestry.html

Flora and fauna in Morris tapestries echo the medieval designs. Figures are dressed in medieval robes and stand in formal poses derived from traditional iconography.

Detail of Galahad or Holy Grail tapestry,

 designed by Edward Bourne-Jones and Morris, woven in the 1890s.

This is one of a six-panel series.

When last heard of, this panel belonged to Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page.

As in the Middle Ages, the late-19th-century Morris tapestries were group projects. Morris collaborated with painter Edward Bourne-Jones, designer John Henry Dearle, architect Phillip Webb and others in the design. Morris enjoyed weaving and spent hours at his loom, but had many weaving assistants.

Producing labor-intensive tapestries eventually convinced Morris that printed fabrics were a necessity. He adapted several of his tapestry designs to cotton prints. The Strawberry Thief was one of his woven fabrics that became a print.

See a Morris chair with Strawberry Thief upholstery in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum by clicking here:
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O9236/adjustable-back-chair-bird-morris-adjustable-back-chair/

Detail from the Morris firm's Forest Tapestry (1887) also in the collection of the V&A.

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O89213/tapestry-the-forest/

Read more about it here:

http://www.theearthlyparadise.com/2008/02/william-morris-forest-tapestry.html

Read more about the tapestries from the Morris firm:
http://thetextileblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/later-tapestry-work-of-john-henry.html

http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/tapestry-greenery-497756

Morris Workshop Designers

8143- Peony- Kate Faulkner-1877

The Morris Workshop reproduction collection for Moda reproduces prints designed by three artists who worked in the Morris workshops in 19th-century London. The major designer was William Morris, the leader of the Arts and Crafts movement. One print is from the hand of Kate Faulkner who began designing for the firm in its first incarnation as Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company. The Faulkner in the title was her brother Charles, the bookkeeper.

Two were by Morris's major design partner John Henry Dearle (1860-1932), who began as an assistant when he was a boy and took over the firm's art direction after Morris's death in 1896. I had originally intended for the designer's name, the design name and date to be printed on the selvage of each piece but we ran out of room. Here are photos of the two in the collection that Dearle designed.

8146 Iris –John Henry Dearle - 1887

8148 Cherwell – John Henry Dearle – 1887

Dearle did many tapestries and carpets. To see one of his collaborations with Morris in the Victoria and Albert Museum click here:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1312_artsandcrafts/explore/object_search/object.php?objectid=1

Below is a design for the pattern that Moda University is selling for The Morris Workshop. Ask your shopowner for the project sheet. Moda artist Susan Stiff designed this variation on an offset Log Cabin design with the blue colorway of Dearle's Cherwell for the border.

The border inspired me to do a little digital cutting and pasting and I came up with a minimalist quilt using lots of Cherwell in a square-in-a-square block. I may get around to making it. It wouldn't take long.