WILLIAM MORRIS AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS
Session at Universities Art Association of Canada Annual Conference

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MONTREAL, QUEBEC, 7-10 NOVEMBER 1996

General information

Schedule

Abstracts of papers

GENERAL INFORMATION

The Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC) Annual Conference will take place 7-10 November 1996, at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. A full-day session with Canadian and international speakers titled "William Morris and the Influence of the Arts and Crafts" will be held on Friday, 8 November.

The Conference now has its own Web page.

FEES
The fees for the entire Conference (in Canadian dollars) are as follows:

Advance Registration $55 (deadline: 1 October)
Registration at Conference $65
Student or unaffiliated artist/scholar $20

It is necessary to be a UAAC member to register for the Conference. Membership categories are as follows:

Individual Voting Member $50 (University and College faculty and professionals in the field of art and art history)
Associate Member $50
Student Member $20
Institutional Member $150

MORE INFORMATION
For complete Conference information and/or to become a member, contact: Mary and Alan Hughes, Hughes & Co., Association Management Services for the UAAC, P.O. Box 5863, Station B, Victoria, B.C., V8R 6S8. Tel.: (604) 480-1026, Fax: (604) 480-0196, mhughes@islandnet.com

WILLIAM MORRIS SESSION SCHEDULE

9:00am-12noon: Conference Session B
"William Morris and the Influence of the Arts and Crafts"

Joan Mattie - Historian, National Historic Sites Directorate, Parks Canada, Ottawa

Morris-like Church Decoration in Ontario - The Work of the Browne Family of Painters

Thomas Grant Browne - Ecclesiastical Designer, Toronto, Ontario

Nine Decades of Ecclesiastical Arts and Crafts in Canada

Ellen McLeod - Independent Scholar, Ottawa, Ontario

The Guild Women of Montreal: Vegetable Dyes and All That

Patrick Mahon - University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario

The Decorative Uncanny

E. L Panayotidis - Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

Artist, Poet and Socialist: Academic Deliberations on William Morris at the University of Toronto, 1896-1925

12noon-12:45pm

Sandra Coley Byron - Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal

Morris & Co. in Montreal: A Tour of Tapestry and Stained Glass Memorials by the Firm in the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul

12:45-2pm: Lunch

2-4.30pm
Peter Cormack - Deputy Keeper, William Morris Gallery, London, England

'Good Craftsman's Glass?': William Morris and the Arts & Crafts Tradition in Stained Glass

Heather Haskins - Independent Scholar

May Morris, Embroidery and Femininity in the Nineteenth Century: Constructed Ideal and/or Lived Reality

Shirley Ann Brown - York University, Toronto

Medieval Continuity and Change in Morris Stained Glass

Susan Wagg - Architectural Historian, Hanover, NH

The University Club of Montreal: An Arts and Crafts Masterwork by Percy Nobbs

Rosalind Pepall - Curator of Canadian Art, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Tour: Two Houses Designed by Architects Edward and W.S. Maxwell - Davis House and Hosmer House, Montreal, Quebec

4:30-5:30pm: Round Table
Future Directions in Canadian Research on William Morris and the Arts and Crafts

Participants will include all of the speakers as well as David Latham, Editor, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies

PLEASE NOTE: this schedule is subject to change. For further information please contact Sandra Alfoldy, Concordia University, Department of Art History, VA-432, 1455 de Maisonneuve West, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G 1M8 or via e-mail : Karen De Lutis, kama@interconnet.com.

ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS

Joan Mattie - Historian, National Historic Sites Directorate, Parks Canada
Morris-like Church Decoration in Ontario - The Work of the Browne Family of Painters

In Ontario, three generations of Brownes have painted over 400 church interiors, since Peter Charles Browne began the family decorating business around 1905. Trained in Scotland in the late-1880s and early-1890s, Browne, with his sons and grandsons, carried out the principles of Arts and Crafts theory in Canada: the union of art and architecture to create an harmonious and humanistic whole; the elevation of handwork over machine work; and an identification with nature, pointedly rejecting the artistic possibilities opened up by the Industrial Revolution. The Brownes' work most closely resembles that of William Morris at St. Jude's Anglican Church in Brantford -- a small Gothic-Revival structure where the murals and painted decorations work together with the medieval-inspired dark wood components, each enhancing the other. Much use is made of meandering, intertwining vines and foliage, while even the narrative scenes emphasize landscape. The presentation will focus mainly on St. Jude's, with a few other church interiors shown to illustrate Arts and Crafts principles employed by the Brownes, if not a Morris-like style.

Thomas Grant Browne - Ecclesiastical Designer
Nine Decades of Ecclesiastical Arts and Crafts in Canada

The Arts and Crafts founder William Morris died one hundred years ago but as a logo of WMS [William Morris Society?] says, "William Morris lives." The movement permeates all aspects of life in Ontario beginning with the educational system near the turn of the century which was broadened by students of the movement immigrating here the following decades. Such a person was Peter Charles Browne born in England who studied and taught art and it relationship to architecture at Hamilton Academy, Scotland during the last years of Morris' life. Immigrating in 1903, he became the Art Director of Thornton and Smith, Toronto, the preeminent interior decorating firm in Ontario who were also church decorators. In 1905 seeing the need for someone who understood art and its relationship to architecture he founded a business of ecclesiastical arts and crafts beginning with the decoration of St. Mary's Church, Toronto. The first of hundreds of such undertakings by the family concern over nine decades. In 1936 at St. Jude's Church, Brantford a decorative programme with three sons was undertaken. In 1994 this painted interior was declared a national historic and architectural site by the Minister of Heritage as an example of the only known work clearly reflecting William Morris.

Ellen McLeod - Independent Scholar
The Guild Women of Montreal: Vegetable Dyes and All That

Canada had its own indigenous flowering of the British arts and crafts movement. It began in Montreal where, a century ago, the philosophy and decorative arts of William Morris were well known and respected. Women's Art Association members in Montreal referred to Morris ideals when they began fostering the home arts and handicrafts of rural Quebec in the mid-1890s. Soon they were selling Doukhobor women's handicrafts from a Morris-furnished home on Stanley Street in Montreal. Their first handicrafts exhibit at Morgan's Store in 1900 included British decorative arts on loan as well as Indian, French Canadian, and immigrant handicrafts. Their 1902 exhibition in the Montreal art gallery was so successful that they inaugurated an educational program to promote good workmanship and design, using vegetable dyes and quality materials. In 1905 they founded the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, a national organization which championed Canadian handicrafts of all cultures. It held annual exhibitions and prize competitions, opened and operated a shop to sell handicrafts for the workers' benefit, and collected the finest examples of craft for study purposes. The Canadian Handicrafts Guild applied many principles articulated by William Morris to develop a unique arts and crafts tradition in Canada.

Patrick Mahon - University of Western Ontario
The Decorative Uncanny

The iconographies within the decorative wallpapers of the Arts and Crafts -- and other papers contemporary with them -- made a significant contribution to the gendering of the Victorian domestic setting. Spatial theorist Mark Wigley has noted that ornamental practices consolidated the order of the buildings they clothed, domesticating woman as the sign of a man. Particular decorative motifs can be viewed as associating themselves alternately with women's and men's spaces mobilizing essentializing iconographies that participate in masking the sexuality of the home.

The apparent dis-connection between the utopic programmes of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts, and Mondrian and de Stijl, (among may early modernist producers), problematizes issues of gender. The production of the Arts and Crafts relied heavily on "women's work," while Mondrian and his ilk developed 'heroic' practices within the studio setting. A paradigm that counters domestic crafting with studio creativity developed, contribution to 'splits' between high and low and women's and men's projects in the modern arts.

This paper stitches together ideas about the relationship of gender issues and the Arts and Crafts, with Freud's notion of The Uncanny as Anthony Vidler has mapped it onto architectural theory in "The Architectural Uncanny." Claiming that decorative motifs may be seen as the 'repressed' within modernism, and as lending themselves to masking what is hidden within domestic interiors, the paper is a working out of ideas that also find form in an actual production of wallpaper and panel works by Patrick Mahon. The lecture will be illustrated by examples of 19th-century wallpapers that were researched as part of the project, and by images of an exhibition based on this word entitled, "Re-entering the House of Flowers," (Burnaby Art Gallery, May-June 1996).

E.L Panayotidis - University of Toronto
Artist, Poet and Socialist: Academic Deliberations on William Morris at the University of Toronto, 1896-1925

Between 1896 and 1925, William Morris became a popular topic of interest with professors and students at the University of Toronto. He was written about in articles in the university press, in academic books and biographies, as part of the curriculum, and especially in lectures on and off campus. Morris was discussed by a prestigious group of academics at the university including: Political Economist James Mavor, Professor of English Literature Pelham Edgar, and J. C.Robertson, Professor of Greek Language at Victoria College. Whether they represented Morris erroneously as a "Catholic genius" (he was agnostic), fervently as a friend and colleague, or even in comparison to Plato, this eclectic group of academics was vital in disseminating a larger awareness of William Morris and his philosophies within the university community and more broadly in Toronto's elite cultural circles. By focussing on the Morris discourse at the University of Toronto, I will show how, contrary to the existing literature on the history of the Arts and Crafts movement in Ontario, Morris' spectre and the ethos of Arts and Crafts ideas were fundamental components of many cultural discussions in turn-of-the-century Toronto. Significantly, I will argue that the championing of Morris and the Arts and Crafts social-aesthetic philosophy, and especially its rhetoric of the centrality of art to daily life, pervaded many facets of Canadian life--especially art, social reform, and education--in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and was crucial in determining character and state-formation.

Sandra Coley Byron - Canadian Centre for Architecture
Morris & Co. in Montreal: A Tour of Tapestry and Stained Glass Memorials by the Firm in the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul

A short distance from McGill's campus, the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul (Presbyterian) includes a variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century stained-glass windows transferred from former church buildings in 1932. Outstanding in the glazing programme is a pair of Morris & Co. stained-glass windows commissioned from the Firm in 1885 and 1903 as memorials to Isabella Anne Smith and her husband Andrew Allan. Made to designs by Edward Burne-Jones, the Firm's chief designer for stained glass, the windows afford a rare opportunity in Canada to study representative glass of this period by Morris & Co.

The discussion will focus on some aspects of the craft as practiced by the Firm and demonstrated here, as well as on their singular innovations in design. The impact of Morris's followers in the Arts and Crafts Movement, particularly with reference to materials and technique, can be seen in later windows in the church by James Ballantine & Son of Edinburgh.

Also of interest is one of the last Morris & Co. tapestries woven at Merton Abbey (1934-1935). Commissioned by Lady Meredith, daughter of Andrew Allan, the wool and silk tapestry is an adaptation of a Burne-Jones design for a stained-glass panel originally made in 1874. Documentation for the three commissions (vintage photographs showing the windows in their original settings, and copies of Morris & Co. sketch and watercolour designs) will be on hand. It may also be possible to view some of the original trefoil tracery lights, in storage since the 1960s.

Suggestions for related sites to visit in Montreal will be provided.

Peter Cormack - Deputy Keeper, William Morris Gallery, London, England
'Good Craftsman's Glass'? William Morris and the Arts & Crafts Tradition in Stained Glass

Although the design and manufacture of stained-glass windows formed a major part of the Morris firm's activity from its establishment in 1861, this is the one field in which Morris's achievements have received less than universal acclaim. Reservations about the style, technique and materials of Morris's stained glass were voiced even by close associates such as Philip Webb and John Ruskin--a critical standpoint adopted also by some adherents of the Arts & Crafts Movement from the 1880s onwards. Morris himself expressed an ambivalence towards the medium and, after 1877, refused to put the Firm's windows into medieval buildings. Nevertheless the available documentary evidence and an examination of the windows themselves indicate that Morris was creatively involved in (and sometimes challenged by) the art and craft of stained glass throughout his career. In close collaboration with Burne-Jones and with Morris & Co.'s team of craftsmen, he developed a modern, expressive idiom in stained glass in which the primacy of materials is a decisive factor--exemplified by the 1880s/90s glazing of St. Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham and of Whitelands College, London. It was these late works which largely provided inspiration for turn-of-the-century designer-makers such as Christopher Whall, whose workshop methods were rooted in Morris's philosophy of craftsmanship even if they diverged from the perceived constraints of his actual practice.

Heather Haskins - Independent Scholar
May Morris, Embroidery and Femininity in the Nineteenth Century: Constructed Ideal and/or Lived Reality

Shirley Ann Brown - York University
Medieval Continuity and Change in Morris Stained Glass

This paper looks at the stained glass designed by the members of the William Morris group, in view of their understanding of and use of medieval precedents. In line with their attitudes toward medieval art and culture, Burne-Jones, Morris, and Madox Brown chose certain motifs which were found in medieval glass and adapted them to contemporary taste. Specific references were made to background foliate motifs, quarry patterns, and the band window. Figure style, however, caused a problem and had to be more radically altered to correspond to the pre-Raphaelite attitude.

Comparison with the medievalism reflected in the stained glass of other firms, such as that of C.E. Kempe, show the different manifestations of what was seen to be the ideal medieval prototype.

Susan Wagg - Architectural Historian, Hanover, NH
The University Club of Montreal: An Arts and Crafts Masterwork by Percy Nobbs

Although the Arts and Crafts movement has been studied by historians of architecture and design--mainly working in Britain and the United States--since the mid-1970s, its influence in Canada is still imperfectly understood. Indeed the designation "Arts and Crafts" continues to be imprecisely applied to certain Canadian architects and works, based on occasional patronage of English Arts and Crafts firms such as Morris & Co. and/or the use of design elements derived second-hand from illustrated magazines and word-of-mouth. Such was the case for both Samuel Maclure (1860-1929) and Eden Smith (1859-1949), who are cited as peers of Percy Nobbs (e.g., by Harold Kalman in his recent A History of Canadian Architecture). Although they, like Nobbs, were eclectics who borrowed from the past, both Maclure and Eden Smith used Arts and Crafts as a style among styles--an aesthetic fashion. In contrast to these older practitioners, Nobbs (1875-1964) arrived in Canada in 1903 with recent training in the most advanced Arts and Crafts circles in Britain. His designs throughout his career reflect a consistent and clearly articulated Arts and Crafts philosophy. An analysis of his University Club on Mansfield Street, with its still-surviving Arts and Crafts interiors, will demonstrate his approach.

Rosalind Pepall - Curator of Canadian Art, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Tour: Two Houses Designed by Architects Edward and W.S. Maxwell - Davis House and Hosmer House, Montreal, Quebec

The James T. Davis house at 3654 Drummond Street was built by the Maxwells in 1909-1911. The interior of this house was decorated by some of Montreal's finest craftsmen and artists. Each room of the house has its own stylistic character. The former billiard room with its stained glass, hand-carved wooden paneling, murals, and hammered brass door fixtures represents one of the best Canadian examples of an interior modeled after the ideals of the British Arts and Crafts movement. The small private oratory designed for Mrs. Davis by William Maxwell in 1915 is a unique architectural ensemble of handcrafted decoration carried out after the architect's designs in collaboration with the Bromsgrove Guild (Canada) Ltd. The Charles R. Hosmer house on the same street was also built by the Maxwell firm in 1901-1902. This is a much grander, more ornately decorated house than the Davis residence, yet it reflects as well the ideal of integrating the decorative work of the artist and craftsman with the interior architecture of the building. In the dining-room the walls were originally hung with William Morris's Peacock and Dragon blue wool fabric. The extravagant hand-carved decoration of the wall-paneling is still in place in this room.