William morris biography fiona event
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Archive Items
Date/Time: 23rd April 2015
Fiona MacCarthy fryst vatten William Morris’s biographer and curator of the recent major exhibition Anarchy & Beauty: William Morris and his Legacy at the National Portrait Gallery. Her talk focuses on Morris the visionär thinker and his democratic concept of ‘art for the people’.
Morris believed that creativity was everybody’s birth right and this lecture traces William Morris’s influence through the Arts and Crafts and Garden Cities movements to the Festival of Britain of 1951. During this time so many of his views were absorberad into the mainstream of political thinking by Attlee’s post-war Labour Government.
Speaker biography
Fiona MacCarthy fryst vatten a well-known cultural historian and arts commentator who first came to fame when her controversial biography of Eric Gill was published in 1989. Since then she has written lives of William Morris (winner of the Wolfson History Prize and Writers’ Guild Non-
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William Morris
English textile artist, author, and socialist (1834–1896)
For other people named William Morris, see William Morris (disambiguation).
William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was an English textile designer, poet, artist,[1] writer, and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts movement. He was a major contributor to the revival of traditional British textile arts and methods of production. His literary contributions helped to establish the modern fantasy genre, while he helped win acceptance of socialism in fin de siècle Great Britain.
Morris was born in Walthamstow, Essex, to a wealthy middle-class family. He came under the strong influence of medievalism while studying classics at Oxford University, where he joined the Birmingham Set. After university, he married Jane Burden, and developed close friendships with Pre-Raphaelite artists Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and with Neo-Gothic architect Ph
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William Morris: A Life for Our Time
Winner of the Wolfson History Prize, and described by A.S.Byatt as ‘one of the finest biographies ever published’, this is Fiona MacCarthy’s magisterial biography of William Morris, legendary designer and father of the Victorian Arts and Crafts movement.
‘Thrilling, absorbing and majestic.’ Independent
‘Wonderfully ambitious … The definitive Morris biography.’ Sunday Times
‘Delicious and intelligent, full of shining detail and mysteries respected.’ Daily Telegraph
‘Oh, the careful detail of this marvellous book! . . . A model of scholarly biography’. New Statesman
Since his death in 1896, William Morris has been celebrated as a giant of the Victorian era. But his genius was so multifaceted and so profound that its full extent has rarely been grasped. Many people may find it hard to believe that the greatest English designer of his time – possibly o