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Jane Morris

Jane Burden Morris (1839-1914) was born poor in Oxford, England. Both of Jane’s parents came to Oxford from the country as agricultural work declined, and were barely literate. Her father worked as a stableman and her older brother became a college messenger at the age of 14. Her older sister died of tuberculosis. The family moved frequently, but never far, only from house to house in the slums of Holywell Street. Little is known of her childhood, because in later years she rarely spoke of it. What is known is that her fortunes changed forever in 1857 at a performance of the touring company of London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane. It was there that she was spotted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite art movement, and approached about modeling for him. The London artist was in Oxford to decorate the Debating Hall of the new Oxford Union with murals.

In the course of modeling she met William Morris, who had become infatuated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its ideals and was attempting to be a painter. In particular he was mesmerized by the charismatic Rossetti. Now he fell in love with Jane Burden and asked her to marry him. Whatever her feelings for Rossetti were or had been, she married Morris in Oxford on April 26, 1859. They had two daughters, Jenny and May.

Considered very plain in her childhood, through Rossetti's many paintings of her Jane came to be thought of as an icon of beauty. When we think of a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, it is Jane Morris we are thinking of: long, wavy dark hair, a long neck, small, rosebud mouth, long straight nose, grave, sad eyes.

William Morris

William Morris (1834-1896) was the son of a self-made man who had become wealthy from investing in a copper mine. He went to Oxford intending to be a clergyman, but a trip to the cathedrals of France and the influence of John Ruskin’s writings convinced him to become an architect instead. After leaving Oxford he began working for the architect George Edmond Street, but soon (under the influence of the Rossetti) changed career paths again in an unsuccessful attempt to become a painter.

After Morris gave up trying to paint, he went on to write several well-received books of poetry. He also translated Old Norse literature into English, and late in life he became an ardent socialist, but it is as a designer that he is remembered today.

In 1861 he and his friends founded Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., Fine Art Workmen in Painting, Carving, Furniture and the Metals, a firm dedicated to producing decorative articles according to Morris's ideals.

Morris was opposed to mass production and felt that artists should make beautiful, well-made furniture for the common man. He believed in honesty, being true to one’s materials, and in the exercise of skill and craftsmanship. He emphasized function and hated reproduction.

In the early years the Firm, as they called it, produced stained glass, hand-painted tiles, embroidery and furniture. Later, the Firm became known for wallpaper, hand-printed cottons and tapestries. Morris single-handedly brought back the ancient art of vegetable dye, which had fallen out of favor with the invention of aniline dyes. Morris's ideas became the underpinnings of Modernism, and made him arguably the most influential designer of all time.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Born Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (1828-1882) to an Italian immigrant father and a half English, half Italian mother, Rossetti was the second of four children. The family was fairly poor, as their father eked out a living teaching and translating. Rossetti attended an art school that prepared young artists for the Royal Academy, but he found the work dull. He wrote a fan letter to Ford Madox Brown in 1848 and became his pupil, and through his classes became friends with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Together they founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Their main goal was to study nature directly, and they placed themselves in opposition to the “conventional and learned by rote” aspects of contemporary art. For a while they were the enfant terribles of the London art scene, vilified by almost everyone, until the critic John Ruskin took up their cause and they became more or less accepted. After only a few years the group went their separate ways, though many of the members went on to become famous painters and critics. Rossetti began grooming a new group of protégés, including William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.

Rossetti began a relationship with shopgirl-turned-model Lizzie Siddal in 1851, but they did not marry until 1860. Lizzie had a miscarriage in May of 1861 and in February of 1862 overdosed on laudanum and died. It is likely that she committed suicide. In a show of grief Rossetti buried the only copy of his poems in her casket. A few years later he thought better of it and had Lizzie exhumed and the poems retrieved. They were published in 1871.

From 1865 on most of Rossetti's paintings are of Jane, though it is not clear when their affair actually began or its extent. In the summer of 1871 Rossetti and Jane spent the summer together in Gloucestershire while Morris was in Iceland. But in the spring of 1872 Rossetti suffered a mental breakdown, precipitated by his feud with a critic of his poetry and his increasing drug addiction. He and Jane had ended their affair by 1875, and Rossetti was a broken man until his death in 1882.