Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Bonfire of the vanities

by
October 2013, no. 355

William Morris Textiles by Linda Parry

V&A Publishing, $69.99 hb, 304 pp, 9781851777327

Bonfire of the vanities

by
October 2013, no. 355

Of the innumerable books on the design work of William Morris (1834–96) that have appeared since the 1980s, the one that has remained the best and most informative is Linda Parry’s William Morris: Textiles (1983), published early on in her career as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Since then, there has been much new research on Morris and many exhibitions of his work (at least six in Australia alone). In 1996 he was the subject of a centenary retrospective at the V&A, for which Parry was the curator and editor of the exhibition book. Two major biographies by Fiona MacCarthy – William Morris: A Life for our Time (1994) and The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (2011) – add substantially to our understanding of Morris and his firm, Morris & Co. Interest in this remarkable Victorian – poet, novelist, artist, socialist reformer – appears to be stronger than ever, and demand for Morris-designed textiles and wallpapers is insatiable; many remain in production either as reproductions or adaptations. This new, extensively updated and rewritten version of William Morris: Textiles benefits from all these later publications and exhaustive new research, deftly contextualised by Parry.

Christopher Menz reviews 'William Morris: Textiles' by Linda Parry

William Morris Textiles

by Linda Parry

V&A Publishing, $69.99 hb, 304 pp, 9781851777327

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.