William Morris and The Pre-raphaelites
William Morris , the nineteenth-century socialist, writer and craftsman, had a profound influence on his contemporaries and on subsequent generations. In some respects he was an ally of Karl Marx, railing against the iniquities of private property and the squalor of industrialized society. Where he differed from Marx, however, was in his belief that machines necessarily enslave the individual, and in his vision of a world in which each person would be liberated through a sort of communistic, crafts-based economy. His prose/poem story News from Nowhere vaguely described his Utopian society, but his main legacy was the Arts and Crafts Movement , a direct offshoot of his work and a lasting influence on British crafts. His career as an artist began at Oxford, where he met Edward Burne-Jones, who shared his admiration for the arts of the Middle Ages. After graduating they both ended up in London, painting under the direction of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the leading light of the Pre-Raphaelites - a loose grouping of artists intent on regaining the spiritual purity characteristic of art before Raphael and the Renaissance tainted the world with humanism. In 1861 Morris founded Morris & Co ("The Firm"), whose designs came to embody the ideas of the Arts and Crafts Movement, one of whose basic tenets was formulated by its founder: "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." Rossetti and Burne-Jones were among the designers, though the former remains better known for his paintings of Jane Morris, his friend's wife and his own mistress, whom he turned into the archetypal Pre-Raphaelite woman. Morris's own designs for fabrics, wallpapers and numerous other products were to prove a massive - some would say negative - influence in Britain, as evidenced by the success of the Laura Ashley aesthetic, a lineal descendant of Morris's rustic nostalgia. Morris's energy was not exhausted by his work for The Firm. In 1890 he set up the Kelmscott Press , named after but not located at his summer home, whose masterpiece was the so-called Kelmscott Chaucer , the collected poems of one of the Pre-Raphaelites' great heroes, with woodcuts by Burne-Jones. Morris also pioneered interest in the architecture of the Cotswolds - it was in response to hideous restoration work in this region that Morris instigated the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings , still an active force in preserving the country's architectural heritage.
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