Lucius Books Blog

We have recently acquired a beautiful original Jessie Marion King (1875-1949) artwork illustrating William Morris’s 1891 poem ‘For the Bed at Kelmscott’, which is incorporated into King’s design in four columns along the bottom of the painting. Before reaching us, it was given by King to her friend Mary Murray (nee Geikie) and thence passed down by family descent. This fantastic piece, in marrying King and Morris, offers a condensed view of the evolution and continued influence of a series of revolutionary ideas and artistic movements active across the second half of the 19^th century and into the 20^th century. You can find details of the illustration here.

Morris wrote ‘For the Bed at Kelmscott’ to be used in the embroidery of the pelmet and curtains that were designed and embroidered by his daughter May Morris and her assistants for his beloved four poster bed at Kelmscott Manor, which was constructed from Elizabethan and Jacobean panelling. Images of the bed can be seen here.

King was no stranger to illustrating Morris’s poetry; some of her greatest achievements in book illustration are her enchanting illustrations for a 1904 edition of ‘The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems’, a collection of poems first published in 1858 by Bell and Daldy when Morris was only 24 years old. The poems convey dreamlike images and tales of a legendary medieval world inspired by both historical and contemporary material, such as Thomas Mallory’s ‘Morte de Arthur’ and the mid-19^th century’s flourishing wealth of Pre-Raphaelite artwork, both of which Morris and his lifelong friend Edward Burne-Jones enthusiastically immersed themselves in as young men. Images of King’s illustrations for the collection can be found here.

Morris’s work and beliefs, from ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ (which is sometimes described as the first book of Pre-Raphaelite poetry) to his traditionally manufactured textiles and wallpapers for Morris and Co., formed a seamless bridge between the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and the Arts and Crafts movement that found its momentum in the late 19th century. Both movements simultaneously looked backwards and forwards in time, reacting against the industrialisation and mechanisation of the Victorian era by drawing on medieval culture to imagine a sometimes utopian reality that values beauty, nature, craftsmanship, art and individual agency. While the Pre-Raphaelite movement focused on conjuring visions of this ideal realm, the later Arts and Crafts movement attempted to bring these ideas to fruition in the real world by showcasing and teaching traditional, hand-worked crafts such as woodwork, embroidery and ceramics, elevating the cultural status of the decorative arts and endowing working people with specialised, holistic skills as opposed to the compartmentalised, small and repetitive tasks upon which the industrial revolution’s factory-based model was built.

King’s association with Morris’s work provides an interesting insight into the next step in the evolution of this modern-medievalist school of thought as it entered the 20th century and the once shocking intensity of the industrial revolution began to cool and morph into new forms. King was educated and later taught at the Glasgow School of Art, which formed the centre of the Scottish realisation of the Arts and Crafts movement. The painter Francis Newbury, an admirer of Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement’s ideology, became the headmaster of the school in 1885 and he soon expanded its originally narrow, fine art focus to include a range of applied arts subjects, such as metal work and textiles. Whilst clearly embedded within the wider Arts and Crafts tradition, the ‘Glasgow Style’ for which the school became famous was recognisable by its incorporation of Celtic themes and imagery: where English Arts and Crafts designers drew heavily on continental-influenced medieval art and literature, Scottish designers also drew on the elongated, swirling lines and forms found in ‘insular’ Celtic art and featured figures and creatures inspired by the nature spirits of Scottish mythology. Accordingly, King’s illustrations for ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ abandon Pre-Raphaelite solidity and comparative realism, favouring airy fluidity, a touch of the new century’s particular passion for the whimsy of the fairy story, and emphasise the dream-like nature of Morris’s poetry.  ‘For the Bed at Kelmscott’, an exceptionally characteristic example of Jessie M. King’s original artwork, offers a similarly light and mystical flavour to Morris’s work. Morris’s poem invokes the feeling of being safe and warm at home on a cold winter night, which King interprets through a host of ethereal spirits and angels that surround the bed with magical activity.

The larger part of King’s career happened at a time when the once rebellious ideas introduced by the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, Morris and his associates and the Arts and Crafts movement, had, to an extent, become incorporated within post-industrialised society. This allowed for King’s commercial success as a designer and illustrator, stocked by Liberty’s and commissioned by a number of publishers, whilst the persisting social enthusiasm and infrastructure instigated by reformers like Morris allowed her to continue the Arts and Crafts movement’s dedication to the teaching, development and elevation of designer-led decorative arts. Most notably she popularised a wax resist technique called batik among British artists and consumers, creating her own range of silk batik scarf designs, instructing on the technique and creating her own narrative guide book on batik called ‘How Cinderella Was Able to Go to the Ball’.

‘For the Bed at Kelmscott’ and King’s association with Morris’s work tells a wonderful story of Morris’s early, Pre-Raphaelite dreams turned to material, late Arts and Crafts reality, carried out by a host of successful, skilled and passionate artists and designers, a story which may serve as inspiration to modern day artists who are living through not an industrial revolution, but a digital one.