[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Arts and Crafts Movement - William Morris
The English socialist William Morris, a leading figure of the Arts and Crafts movement, pictured in 1870. His political and artistic convictions were closely linked, and he claimed that art as ‘man’s expression of his joy in labor’ was stifled by the squalid industrialism of Victorian England, although only the rich could afford to buy his expensive designs.Born in 1834 William Morris was a revolutionary figure on many fronts. A member of the Pre- Raphaelites, the hugely influential art movement, a founder of the Arts and Craft movement, whose ideas and theories spread across Europe and are the basis of many other art styles and, last, but not least an early pioneer of socialism and socialist ideas .
Morris was born into a comfortable upper-middle class family, who for much of his life enjoyed the trappings of that background. He was educated at Marborough and Oxford, where he met up with Edward Burne-Jones with whom he had a life long friendship. Both had a deep interest in medieval craftsmen/artists, which for Morris would form the backbone of some of his later ideas. During this period he linked up with one of the main driving forces of the Pre-Raphalites, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Pre-Raphalites who rallied against the academic painting of their time, looking to the early Italian masters for their artistic inspiration, hence the name, they would go on to become a world famous artistic movement which was eclipsed only by the Impressionists of France.
Morris, though a designer more than a painter, did, however, play an integral role in the life of the Pre Raphalites. One of his few remaining paintings 'Queen Guenevere' (1858) was done under the direction of Rossetti, and in around 1857 he assisted Burne-Jones and Rossetti to paint frescoes for the Oxford Union.....
