Jakartass Home thoughts from abroad. Alien thoughts from home.

Click for much larger image.
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My ‘Image of the Week’ nearly a year ago was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Astarte Syriaca.

As I wrote then, I was a student teacher when I first became enamoured with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Rossetti was a close friend of William Morris, a designer and craftsman and also a writer, retailer, and political activist. Other friends were Edward Burne-Jones and Ford Madox Brown. In 1861, the four joined forces with P. P. Marshall, and Philip Webb*, an architect and Rossetti’s art tutor, to form Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., Fine Art Workmen in Painting, Carving, Furniture and the Metals. The prospectus of the firm stated that it was set up to create and sell medieval-inspired, handcrafted items for the home and would undertake carving, stained glass, metal-work, paper-hangings, chintzes (printed fabrics), and carpets.

(The company changed its name to Morris & Co. in 1875, and Morris assumed full ownership.)

In 1860, Morris commissioned Webb to design the Red House in Bexleyheath, then among Kent’s orchards but now an outer suburb of London, as a home for his new wife, Janey Burden (an occasional model for Rossetti) and expected family.

However, in 1865 rheumatic fever, blamed partly on the stress of commuting everyday to work, and the increasing demands of the company meant that Morris reluctantly moved back to London.

What should be obvious from my brief outline is that in the mid-Victorian years in the 18th century, a group of enthusiastic idealists rebelled against the social upheaval engendered by the industrial revolution.

Further proof has now literally been uncovered during restoration work at the Red House with the discovery of a mural hidden behind a large built-in wardrobe on Morris’s bedroom wall. This was painted by the group of friends who were yet to have such a profound influence that their ideas still resonate today.

The image above is from another room, but, hey, it’s a lot more interesting than the one the Guardian has replaced it with.
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Webb* and Morris were influential in the Arts and Crafts Movement, and also founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877. Webb also joined Morris’s revolutionary Socialist League, becoming its treasurer.