Spiritual material

Anyone familiar with Islamic art will long have known how heavily William Morris drew his inspiration from the Islamic world. One glance at his patterns is enough – the repetition to infinity, the twisting foliage, the richly entangled fruit and birdlife, the stylized designs that are often botanically impossible, yet speak to us at some deep primordial level – all are hallmarks of Islamic art. Curiously, ever since his patterns were popularized, appearing in every imaginable accessory in our kitchens and living rooms, from curtains to coasters, from tablecloths to mouse mats, those iconic Morris designs have been subsumed as “quintessentially English”, somehow deemed to be an intrinsic part of our British cultural identity. It is the same blind spot that exists with gothic cathedrals such as Notre-Dame, proclaimed to be “quintessentially French”, synonymous with the French national identity, by those oblivious to the Islamic origins of such rich architectural styles and ornamentation.

Until, that is, it is pointed out – in exhibitions such as this – and the eye becomes trained. All credit is due to the William Morris Gallery, the fine Georgian family home in Walthamstow, east London, where Morris grew up, for staging this show, and for highlighting to a British audience what has been hiding in plain sight all along. The starting point of the exhibition is a smallish room that brings together items from the Islamic world, all of which, crucially, once belonged to Morris and his family. Though he never travelled further east than Italy, Morris acquired a range of carpets, textiles, metalwork and ceramics mainly from Iran, Syria and Turkey, which clearly served as his prototypes and were used to decorate his homes. This geographic range is important to the curators’ careful and deliberate choice of phrasing in the title: Art from the Islamic World is a much more accurate description than was common in Victorian times, when all Islamic art was labelled “Persian”, considered the ultimate in orientalist chic.

When Morris, who often railed against the privileged society into which he was born, launched his business in 1861 (he later opened a shop on Oxford Street), he was trying to bring his styles to the middle classes, well aware that most of his commissions were for wealthy clients with more money than aesthetic sense. “I spend my life ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich”, he lamented. Some mocked his handmade approach to design and craftsmanship as “thoroughly medieval” and “useless”. At the time his style of artist-led designs, using quality materials and hand craftmanship, was pushing against the tide of the Industrial Revolution. “I have never been in any rich man’s house”, he declared, “which would not have been the better for having a bonfire made of nine-tenths of all that it held.” It was part of his “crusade against the age”, and in the end his persistence prevailed, for by the turn of the century Morris & Co had become a byword for good taste. He sold to important clients in Europe, the US, Australia and Canada, exhibiting at international trade fairs in Paris, Boston and Philadelphia to raise the company’s profile. He learnt to be a businessman, buying out his partners and extending his product range to more affordable off-the-shelf items such as wallpapers, fabrics and tiles. The Arts and Crafts movement, spearheaded by Morris, began in England and flourished in Europe and America between 1880 and 1920. On his death in 1896, aged sixty-two, his coffin was draped in a magnificent seventeenth-century Ottoman brocaded velvet from his own collection, made from silk and metal thread in Bursa, the first Ottoman capital.

Regret that his products were beyond the reach of the ordinary working class contributed to Morris’s growing political activism. Acutely conscious of his privileged status in high society, he denounced the increasing industrialization of the time and became a socialist at the age of fifty. He criticized the British government’s attempts to drag the country into a Russian-Turkish war in 1877, warning against “false patriotism” and the dubious motives of the ruling classes who were led only by desire for profit.

Becoming a fervent environmentalist, he descried the despoliation of the landscape and fought to stop the pollution of the Thames and the destruction of Epping Forest. Although he was a nervous public speaker, his belief in his cause led him to deliver close to 100 lectures a year, sometimes three a week, determined to make a difference. Driven by idealism, he wanted to imagine a world in which communities were equal, with no concept of private property, where craftsmanship and creativity could flourish. In 1877 he founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and he led the campaign to save the west front of St Mark’s in Venice. He was also outraged by the appalling restoration of St Albans Cathedral, where the new pseudo-gothic west front damaged much of the original fabric.

In southwest London, at Merton Abbey, the gothic ruins of which he restored, along with its watermill (another innovation introduced to Europe from Syria via Islamic Spain) on the River Wandle, Morris recreated an environment of medieval craftsmanship and techniques. He used natural dyes such as indigo, disliking intensely the synthetic dyes of the times, even though it took him ten years of experimentation to achieve good results. So smitten was he with the beauty of Persian and Turkish carpets, hanging them on his walls or draping them over his tables as far too precious to walk on, that he decided to pioneer the production of handmade rugs in Britain, recruiting experienced weavers from the declining Spitalfields silk industry and using specially built hand looms, hoping that their skills would pass down to the next generation so that Britain might build its own hand-woven carpet tradition. One such example, called “Peacock and Bird”, is on display here, so strikingly inferior in workmanship to the real thing that it serves as a clear marker that, even with the best will in the world, and the money, such traditions take centuries to accumulate and evolve.

All Islamic art seeks ultimately to recreate Paradise in the form of gardens and rivers, flowers and trees, where hierarchy is absent and where all live peacefully in mutual cooperation. The material and the spiritual world are connected through geometry, the unifying intermediary. This is precisely what Morris the idealist clearly felt drawn to in Islamic art, with its egalitarian traditions and deep respect for nature. As a child he had loved observing birds, flowers and plants in the Essex countryside. One of his most sophisticated patterns, which he named after a tributary of the Thames, is based on meandering diagonal stems and natural growth, so that, as he put it, “even where a line ends, it should look as if it had plenty of capacity for more growth”. This, together with his use of stylized birds and animals in pairs to give underlying geometric structure to his patterns, is a further borrowing from Islamic art, as are other motifs he used, such as flowers in vases.

“Granada”, the most technically complicated textile Morris ever produced, so complex that it never reached commercial production, was woven in 1884 at Merton Abbey. It featured pomegranates and almond-shaped buds, connected by pointed arches and branches, and the name tells us that his inspiration came from the patterns of the Alhambra, the palace of the Nasrid kings. Though Morris never visited the Alhambra, he knew it through the lens of the designer and architect Owen Jones (1809–74), who spent six months at the end of his Grand Tour, aged twenty-five, drawing detailed sketches of the palace’s stucco wall patterns and acquiring a fascination with geometry, colour theory and the use of abstraction in decorative ornament. The result was The Grammar of Ornament (1856), still used as a sourcebook in design schools internationally.

As the gothic revival got under way, the wealth generated by industry and trade, together with religious reform, resulted in a frenzy of churchbuilding, leading Morris to enter the market for church furnishings such as stained glass, embroidery, furniture and metalwork. Many of his contemporaries shared his interests and beliefs, including the stained-glass designer and tile-maker William De Morgan, who also joined the Arts and Crafts movement. He moved his business to Merton Abbey, where he reproduced the fourteenth-century “lustreware” techniques of Muslim craftsmen, inspired by Islamic and medieval patterns. His tiles also decorate the walls of Leighton House in Holland Park, west London, where the famous Arab Hall showcases original sixteenth- century Damascus tiles procured on behalf of the painter Lord Frederic Leighton (1830-96).

A separate room in the exhibition is devoted to Morris’s daughter May, who travelled to the Islamic world after her father’s death. It displays the various items, especially textiles, that she brought back and clearly valued highly, becoming a collector herself as well as a donor.

A beautifully illustrated book, titled Tulips and Peacocks in a nod to the most prized flower of the Ottoman Turks and the most loved bird of the Persians, has been published to accompany this exhibition. It features ten essays by different specialists, including excellent contributions from the exhibition’s curators, Rowan Bain and Qaisra M. Khan, each exploring aspects of Morris’s connections to Islamic art.

Morris believed that through his work he could act as a bridge, allowing craftspeople of the past to hand on their knowledge to contemporary artisans. The enduring popularity of his patterns suggests that this may have been no idle dream, as people continue to respond to the same quasi-mystical, otherworldly qualities in his designs, which echo those of Islamic art. Just below the surface there is always the sense that something divine, something bigger than us mere mortals, unites us in our humanity. In this, perhaps, lies Morris’s universal appeal.

Diana Darke’s most recent book is Islamesque: The forgotten craftsmen who built Europe’s medieval monuments, 2024

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