TULIPS & PEACOCKS: WILLIAM MORRIS AND ART FROM THE ISLAMIC WORLD

This publication is a collection of wide-ranging essays rather than a catalogue of the recent exhibition at the William Morris Gallery. The museum’s director, Hadrian Garrard, argues in his preface that the influence of Islamic art on Morris’s designs has not been fully explored until now.

The ten chapters cover a variety of themes. Bain’s introduction emphasises Morris’s familiarity with embroideries, woven velvets, silks, carpets and metalwork from Iran, Syria and Turkey, expressed through his lectures, correspondence, and role as Art Referee for what was then the South Kensington Museum.

In a later chapter Bain and Qaisra M. Khan describe how Morris’s designs were shaped by the worldwide exchange of ideas, art and craft and emphasise his role in revitalising traditional craft techniques from diverse cultures. Some of his collection can be seen in Emery Walker’s photos of Kelmscott House.

Several chapters cover the influence of Morris and his daughter May as collectors and their subsequent gifts and bequests to the South Kensington Museum, the South London Art Gallery and Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. The Fitzwilliam Museum also benefited through Sydney Cockerell’s close links to the Morris family. In 1908 he was appointed director of the Fitzwilliam and Rebecca Bridgman describes the impact of Cockerell’s purchase of four Isnik tile panels, two of which came from the Morris estate.

Although both Jane and May Morris travelled to Egypt and North Africa after his death, Morris himself never ventured beyond Italy. Shaheed Saleem comments that for Morris ‘the ‘Orient’ referred to ‘an imaginary realm from where a plethora of geometric or floral-patterned and hand-crafted textiles and objects poured forth’ rather than an actual place. The book is well produced and beautifully illustrated; it will provoke interest and provide inspiration for all.

TULIPS & PEACOCKS: WILLIAM MORRIS AND ART FROM THE ISLAMIC WORLD

Rowan Bain (ed), Yale University Press in association with William Morris Gallery, 2024, hb £35

Condensed from a review by Mary Greensted in DAS Newsletter No. 133