William Morris Research Paper

The root of William Morris’s values resides in the morality and honesty in creating items to take pride and joy in for a lifetime. William Morris follows the ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the sense that he values not the efficiency of his contemporary machine, but the skill and expertise of the individual worker that is employed in his factory. He has spent a majority of his life working with his own hands with minimal to no aid from the machines that served as a highlight of the Industrial Revolution. He has once said, in his utopian novel, News From Nowhere, “If others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream” . Morris’s work as a designer has produced a vast and varied assortment of quality

In the beginning, Morris’s company sought to accommodate the church, a primary commissioner of decorations. However, as the demand for secular products lessened over the years, William Morris focused his craft to dyeing and printing. Morris & Co., reestablished in 1875, shifted its focus from church adornments, glass, and furnishings to dyeing and weaving all while keeping its medieval inspired aesthetic. Morris & Co. became known for the brand’s meticulously crafted tapestries and wallpapers . The art of tapestry weaving has been all but extinct until Morris reached out to revive the traditional art. He has done the same for woodblock printing, a method used to print Morris & Co. wallpapers. The high level of craftsmanship was the result of an accumulation of skills in Morris’s life as well as his experience traveling and sharing knowledge among his fellow craftsmen in his formerly shared company. The idealistic industry through the eyes of Morris would be centered on highly skilled craftsmen, much like himself, taking joy in the art of creating a product as opposed to mass-producing a substandard object of little interest or