The William Morris Society in the U.S. is pleased to award the 2017 Dunlap Fellowship to Sarah Leonard, a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation, “‘The
beauty of the bough-hung banks’: William Morris in the Thames Landscape,” promises to be an important contribution not only to Morris studies but to understanding of the natural environment in the Victorian era. Here is Sarah's summary of her project:
My dissertation investigates
the disparate riverside landscapes of the Victorian Thames as dominant
presences in Morris’s varied and intertwined roles as designer, author,
political thinker, and factory owner. As a lifelong London resident, Morris was
most familiar with the polluted, industrialized city Thames. However, he drew
visual inspiration from the rural landscape of the Upper Thames around
Kelmscott for his famous pattern designs, and he put forward the same landscape
as a medievalist and Socialist pastoral ideal in his poetry, novels, and
political writings. At the same moment, he was searching out clean river water
for the industrial production of his fabrics and using that water to wash
dyestuffs away from his printed fabrics and downstream into the London river.
 |
| James McNeill Whistler, Thames Warehouses (1859; Freer Gallery) |
In order to understand Morris’s thoughts on the Thames
landscape, the inspiration he drew from it, and the ways he interacted with it,
it is essential to consider the Thames and its tributaries as he might have
known them – physically, in how they looked and functioned, and culturally, in
how they were addressed by the writers, artists, and thinkers with whom Morris
would have been familiar. Therefore, my combined landscape studies and art
historical approach looks to art, literature, archival records, and the
physical sites of Morris’s life to form a broad and detailed account of
Morris’s Thames landscapes, their uses and depictions, and their cultural
context. This account reveals the ways in which Morris’s physical and cultural
landscapes manifested in the design and production of his works, focusing
particularly on the series of printed patterned fabrics he named for
tributaries of the Thames and its estuary: Cray,
Evenlode, Kennet, Lea, Lodden, Medway, Wandle, Wey, and Windrush.
 |
| William Morris, Wey (1883; V& A Museum) |
I will use the funds provided by the
Dunlap Fellowship to support a research trip to the United Kingdom, currently
planned for summer 2017. During this
trip, I will visit a number of council archives and local museums to view
documentation and images of Morris’s riverside landscapes. This material, along with
research I plan to undertake in the maps collection of the British Library, will help to reveal the historic features of Morris’s landscapes,
as well as the changes they underwent both in his lifetime and in the ensuing
120 years. I will also view Thames imagery and ephemera at both the Museum of
London and the River and Rowing Museum, Henley, and study Morris’s original
tributary pattern designs at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Birmingham
Art Gallery. All of this work is essential to my landscape- and ecology-focused
interpretation of Morris’s works and legacy, and will contribute particularly
to my dissertation chapters concerning Morris’s London and the Merton Abbey
factory.
