The commercial ubiquity of William Morris patterns, fundamental to the idea of a “British taste”, has always stood in stark contrast to the radical socialism of their creator. Indeed, Morris’s famous dictum, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”, is interpreted more as a gesture of style than as the statement of an anticonsumerist firebrand. Morris’s patterns, such as ‘Willow Bough’ or ‘Strawberry Thief’, have long disconnected themselves from the political beliefs of their designer and established themselves as icons of British bourgeois taste.

This tension, however, has been fruitful for the curators at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, which was once the Morris family home, and where exhibitions can seem like a foray into the heart of the decorative arts in Britain. The gallery’s latest exhibition, William Morris & Art from the Islamic World, is no exception. Co-curated by Qaisra Khan of the Khalili Collection and Rowan Bain of the William Morris Gallery, and featuring a masterly catalogue, Tulips and Peacocks, the show tells the often-overlooked story of how Morris collected, and was inspired by, the arts of the Islamic world.

The show is centred around the many Islamic objects that Morris collected, which are placed in a dialogue with his patterns, in particular the most clearly Islamically inspired Flower Garden from 1879, and Wild Tulip and Granada, both from 1884. But beyond this, it becomes clear that the “decorative” aspects of Islamic artefacts (like those of the Middle Ages, well established in the popular understanding of his oeuvre) played an important role in Morris’s work. As Rowan Bain explains: “It’s always been a line in a description of Morris. There might have been a couple of patterns, particularly textiles, that people referred to, that previous scholars have have mentioned and referenced. But the starting point to this exhibition, was, well, what does that mean? What do we know that he actually looked at? What did he collect?” Morris died young – at 62 – and was incredibly prolific throughout his life. However, he never travelled east of Italy, and his collection of Islamic art was acquired via dealers in London, which was saturated with objects exported with few controls from a stuttering Ottoman Empire and from Iran. Morris’s interest is likely to have been triggered by his encounter with the recreation of a complete room from Damascus in the gallery of a carpet merchant. He described the room as “all vermillion and gold and ultramarine, very beautiful, and it is just like going into The Arabian Nights”.

For Morris, like other contemporary collectors of Islamic art, such as Frederick Leighton, the engagement with these objects was overlaid with a certain idea of the East – one that both obscured and brought certain things to light. Around the same time, Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament sought to bring Islamic art into a wider encyclopaedia of decorative design. Yet, unlike figures such as Leighton – who was far wealthier than Morris and assembled a collection that was grander and more ambitious in its scope – Morris sought artistic inspiration from what he purchased and saw. As he wrote, “To us pattern designers, Persia has become a holy land, for there in the process of time our art was perfected.”

Like Leighton, Morris was keen to create worlds, environments, almost sets with the objects he owned, hanging velvets and rugs on the walls of his country house, Kelmscott Manor, and placing his objects into dialogue with one another. As with the exhibition of any artist’s collection (one thinks of

Howard Hodgkin’s collection of Mughal miniatures at the Ashmolean), the works are fascinating both as objects in themselves and in offering a window into the aesthetic world of Morris himself. The two great peacock incense burners that famously flanked the stairway at Kelmscott are perhaps not the finest examples of metalwork that could be found, but they fit so well in the Morris aesthetic that seeing them here brings them profoundly to life.

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Issue 67, December 2024 Beauty in the Wilderness
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