May Morris, the overlooked star of the Arts and Crafts movement

In 1936, May Morris wrote a letter to the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. “I’m a remarkable woman,” she said, “always was, though none of you seemed to think so.” This statement, both forthright and facetious, is today plastered across a wall of the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, east London. In its new context, the assertion has added pertinence. William Morris has an entire museum devoted to his legacy — yet few have heard of his younger daughter, and fewer still appreciate her contribution to the decorative arts.

A new exhibition at the gallery, May Morris: Art and Life, seeks to redress the imbalance, establishing May as one of the leading designers of the early 20th-century Arts and Crafts movement. More than 80 pieces, including drawings, designs, embroidery, wallpaper, textiles and jewellery, display the diversity of May’s abilities. As well as her craftwork, May wrote books and plays, went on lecture tours and helped to run the family business. “We talk all the time about [William] Morris being a polymath, but May was multi-talented, just like her father,” says Helen Elletson, curator at the William Morris Society.

Born in 1862, May was the second daughter of William and Jane Morris. Hers was an unconventional childhood; the two Morris girls wore loose, un-corseted “artistic dresses” favoured by their mother. “I am a great tomboy,” an eight-year-old May wrote in her journal. The Pre-Raphaelite milieu to which the Morrises belonged meant that from a young age May was exposed to a range of artistic and political influences. She was largely educated at home, enrolling in the National Art Training School (later the Royal College of Art) at age 16.

May began working at Morris & Co in the early 1880s. By then, the company had established its reputation in London for producing exquisite household decor, having completed commissions at St James’s Palace and the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert). William Morris was living in Kelmscott House in Hammersmith surrounded by other artists.

Kelmscott House is now privately owned, but the William Morris Society occupies the coach house and basement. In Morris’s day, the space functioned as a meeting room for the Socialist League, says Elletson. May ran the league’s library and hobnobbed with Shaw, Eleanor Marx and Emery Walker, a printer and neighbour.

When May joined Morris & Co, she designed wallpaper. One design, “Horn Poppy” (1885), comes in shades of yellow, blue and russet. May’s most popular and enduring design, “Honeysuckle” (1883), is a tangle of stems, green leaves and fluted peach-coloured blossoms on a plain background. Even at this early age, May’s own aesthetic preferences were emerging; she loved countryside hedgerows. “Her designs are really delicate and beautiful, with muted colours,” says Elletson. They are quite subtle, her designs, more than her father’s. [William’s] are bold, statement patterns.”

When she was 23, May was put in charge of Morris & Co’s embroidery department. Embroidery was a family pursuit; William had taught himself when he was young, and both Jane Morris and May’s aunt Bessie Burden were experts (embroiderers today still wrestle with the Burden stitch). While most middle-class women of the time undertook “Berlin wool work”, a crude style of stitching with coarse yarn, the Morris women embroidered with silk and gold thread on damask in the richly figurative opus anglicanum style that had flourished in the medieval English church.

Customers could select from a range of embroidery designs in an illustrated catalogue, either buying the pattern to make at home or the completed work. Items for sale included cloths, bedcovers, door hangings, firescreens, cushions and pieces for churches, such as altar cloths and lectern covers. May managed a team of needlewomen, liaised with aristocratic clients and oversaw production. Like her father, she was exacting. In a note about a fire screen, she recommends, “a purple very dusky and dead in tone and a yellow clear and fresh”. Buttery yellow and warm purple, meanwhile, made “the most ingeniously hideous admixture of colour possible to imagine”.

When her father died in 1896, May left the company to concentrate on her own projects. Between 1895 and 1900, she produced perhaps her finest work, “Spring and Summer” and “Autumn and Winter”, two silk damask panels dense with flowers, birds and vegetation in coloured and metal thread. She began to give lectures on embroidery practice, exhibited and wrote. In Decorative Needlework (1893), May recommends using simple stitches such as running and darning over exotic and difficult needlework. Design, she wrote, above all, was “the very essence and soul of beautiful embroidery”.

“May helped elevate embroidery to an art form,” says Rowan Bain, senior curator at the William Morris Gallery. “She helped people to see it as something worthy of being put in art galleries and exhibited.”

Throughout her life, May remained a committed socialist. She championed workers’ rights and, particularly in her later years, women’s rights. “It is the want of thorough training that hampers women in the arts, great and small,” she told the International Congress of Women in 1899. “Let us insist on some compact between public and employer, to the end that the labour of those pale, tired hands shall not be cheapened for us at the cost of so great a sacrifice.” In 1907, she co-founded the Women’s Guild of Arts — no existing guild of the time would admit women — and campaigned to raise the professional status and bargaining power of women and girls working in arts and crafts.

After her death in 1938, May’s significance was largely forgotten. The Arts and Crafts style became unfashionable in comparison with Modernism’s clean aesthetic. “The craft of embroidery and textiles in general became devalued,” says Bain. “People stopped having large embroidered hangings in their homes.” May had dedicated nearly a decade to editing the 24 volumes of her father’s Collected Works. In ensuring his legacy lived on, she overshadowed her own.

In the William Morris Gallery, a poignant artefact is another note to Bernard Shaw — a Valentine card from 1886. Painted by hand, it depicts Pre-Raphaelite maidens worshipping at his shrine. Though Shaw wrote in his diary that it was a “handsome” card, May’s feelings were unrequited — years later, she briefly married another socialist, before divorcing without children. In the card, she begs Shaw for a small sign of affection: “ . . . just the minimum/ Of kindness — one brief note! One little line/ is all we ask”. It is as if, all her life, May struggled for her due appreciation.

‘May Morris: Art and Life’ is at the William Morris Gallery until January 28 2018; wmgallery.org.uk.

The William Morris Society is open to the public on Thursdays and Saturdays; a talk about May Morris will be held on December 2; williammorrissociety.org

Emery Walker’s House has guided tours by appointment; emerywalker.org.uk

Photographs: William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest; British Library, George Bernard Shaw Papers; National Museums Scotland; The William Morris Society Hammersmith

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