Exhibition on Essex House Press

An Endeavour in Printing: highlights from the Essex House Press Collection

Court Barn Museum, Chipping Campden
26 April to 1 July 2012

The Essex House Press was a private printing press set up by the Guild of Handicraft. Its aim was to produce books using handmade paper, traditional printing and binding methods and often specially-designed typefaces. The Museum recently acquired the largest and most important collection of Essex House Press material.

The exhibition looks at highlights of the collection and provides an insight into Ashbee’s ideas and passions.

A catalogue including essays by Alan Crawford, Cameron O. Smith and David Lowden accompanies the exhibition.

Two Albion presses in the Guild’s workshops at Chipping Campden.

April feature continued: Places to visit in the United States to see works by Morris and Morris and Co.

New Jersey -  The Stickley Museum and Craftsman Farms. Morris Plains, New Jersey. The Stickley Museum in Morris Plains is home to Gustav Stickley's country estate. It represents a great example of the American arts and crafts tradition. Known as "Craftsman Farms," Stickley Farms marked its hundredth anniversary in 2011. For Stickley, life, art, and beauty were inextricably intertwined.: “It is my own wish, my own final ideal, that the Craftsman house may so far as possible...be instrumental in helping to establish in America a higher ideal, not only of beautiful architecture, but of home life.” For more information, visit:

 http://www.stickleymuseum.org/

Preview of the exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde

Please join Historians of British Art and The English-Speaking Union for a preview of the exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde Thursday, May 24, 2012 6.30 - 8.30 pm.

In September 2012, Tate Britain (London) will open the much-anticipated exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde.  Inspired by early Renaissance painting and led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood rebelled against the establishment of the mid-19^th century and became Britain’s first modern art movement. This major exhibition will bring together more than 150 works in different media, including painting, sculpture, photography, and the applied arts, revealing the Pre-Raphaelites to be advanced in their approach to every genre.  After closing at Tate in January 2013, this exhibition will move to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and then to Moscow and Tokyo.  Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde has been co-curated by Tim Barringer (Yale University), Jason Rosenfeld (Marymount Manhattan University, New York), and Alison Smith (Tate London).

This evening, co-curators Tim Barringer and Jason Rosenfeld will give U.S. audiences an early look at this important exhibition—addressing its key themes and its evolution as a project—during an informal, richly illustrated conversation at The English-Speaking Union in Manhattan.  Their lively discussion will be moderated by Peter Trippi, president of Historians of British Art and a co-curator of the recent touring exhibition J.W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite.  The conversation will be followed by a wine reception.

Presenters

Dr. Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University.  Among his publications are Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1998), Men at Work (2005), and Opulence and Anxiety (2007).  He co-curated Tate’s exhibition American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1825-1880 (2002), and also Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and his Worlds (Yale, 2007).  This year he contributed an essay to the catalogue accompanying the Royal Academy’s exhibition, David Hockney: A Bigger Picture.

Dr. Jason Rosenfeld is Distinguished Chair and Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College. He authored the new monograph on John Everett Millais (Phaidon Press) and co-curated the Millais retrospective that toured the world in 2007-2008.  He contributed an essay to the monograph Stephen Hannock (2009, Hudson Hills Press), and is curator of that artist’s exhibition, presently on view at the Marlborough Gallery, New York, and then traveling to the Marlborough Gallery, London.

Location

The English-Speaking Union

U.S. National Headquarters

144 East 39^th Street (between Lexington and Third Avenues)

New York, NY 10016

212.818.1200

esuus.org

Advance registration is required

$20 for members of HBA and ESU; $25 for non-members.

Payment may be made by credit card, or by check payable to “The English-Speaking Union.”

Checks should be mailed to Ms. Caitlin Murphy, The English-Speaking Union, 144 East 39th Street, New York, NY 10016.  In all cases, you will receive a confirmation of payment if you have provided your email address.

Questions?

For content-related questions, please email Peter Trippi at ptrippi@aol.com. For questions about payment, please email Caitlin Murphy at cmurphy@esuus.org.

John Everett Millais (1829-1896), Isabella, 1848-9, Oil on canvas, 102.9 x 142.9 cm, National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery

The month of April will be dedicated to looking at places to visit in the United States to see works by Morris and Morris and Co.

MAINE - The Sarah Orne Jewett House (Writer, 1849-1909). South Berwick, Maine. Built in 1774, Jewett and her sister Mary updated the Greek revival house they inherited with many arts and crafts touches. According to the Historic New England website, "While the sisters retained earlier wallpapers in four rooms, they made a dramatic statement in the aesthetic style in the front hall, choosing a bold pattern of tulips on a reflective ground to complement a William Morris carpet in the 'Wreath' pattern." The website goes on to talk about how Mary removed the "Wreath" carpet after Sarah died, replacing it with another Morris carpet. The "Wreath" carpet ended up in a trunk, only being rediscovered a few years ago. For more information, visit:

http://www.historicnewengland.org/historic-properties/homes/sarah-orne-jewett-house

News from Nowhere online

The illustrated online text of Morris’s News from Nowhere is now updated and available at http://www.uiowa.edu/~wmorris/NewsFromNowhere/.

The online version is designed to help students and others visualize Guest’s London and his travels through Nowhere. What did the subway which Guest so hated look like in 1890? The Hammersmith Bridge of the time? Thornycroft’s factory? The Houses of Parliament? Westminster Abbey? Trafalgar Square? What was the “Guest House”? The “Old House for New Folk”? The scenes which the rowers viewed as they followed the Thames upriver? The likely site of the final feast in the small country church?

This edition is designed to make Morris’s critique of the old world and vision of the new more accessible and enjoyable for 2012 readers. We welcome comments and suggestions for additions, which should be sent to florence-boos@uiowa.edu.

“William Morris’ Earthly Paradise: Precursor to the Private Press Movement”

The exhibition, “William Morris’ Earthly Paradise: Precursor to the Private Press Movement,” will open at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Art History Gallery 8 March 2012.  This exhibition, curated by Leslie Harwood, a MA candidate at the University, will focus on William Morris’s and Edward Burne-Jones’s Earthly Paradise project in relation to the Kelmscott Press, founded nearly thirty years after the Earthly Paradise project was initiated, in order to prove that the failure of the earlier project to be the instigator in the founding of the Kelmscott Press.

This exhibition will feature several editions of Morris’s Earthly Paradise, the 1868

mass produced edition featuring only one of Burne-Jones’s woodcuts, the 1896 Kelmscott Press edition, and Arthur Richard Dufty’s 1974 reproduction of the “Cupid and Psyche” series, which was printed with Burne-Jones’s original wood blocks. Dufty’s reproduction offers his own interpretation of how Morris intended to design The Earthly Paradise. The exhibition will also feature several books printed at the Kelmscott Press such as William Morris’s News From Nowhere and Well at the World’s End.

Alongside Morris’ books from the Kelmscott Press, several private presses influenced by the press at Kelmscott will be featured, including the Vale Press, Essex House Press, and Golden Cockerel Press, all in London. There will also be two American private presses, the Philosophers Press and the Elston Press. The aims of the exhibition are to discuss Morris’s and Burne-Jones’s intentions, the reasons why they founded the Kelmscott Press, and how the aforementioned private presses continued the legacy of Morris’s ideals in presenting the book as a quality, aesthetically pleasing everyday object.

A catalogue for the exhibition written by Ms. Harwood is available for purchase; for details please contact leslie.harwood@gmail.com.

The William Morris Society-US announces the awarding of 2012 Fellowships

The 2012 William Morris Society Fellowship was awarded to Leslie Harwood, a MA candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Art History and Museum Studies. The award will help fund the installation of Ms. Harwood’s thesis exhibition entitled “William Morris’ Earthly Paradise: Precursor to the Private Press Movement” at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Art History Gallery, opening 8 March 2012.  The award will also be applied towards the printing of a thesis exhibition catalog offered to all of the visitors of the gallery free of charge. The catalogs, as well as the exhibition itself, will educate the UW-Milwaukee community and the greater public about William Morris’s profound impact on the Kelmscott Press and the press’s greater influence on the history of the Private Press Movement. For more information on the exhibition, see additional blog postings.

The 2012 Joseph R. Dunlap Memorial Fellowship was awarded to Kyle Stoneman, a PhD candidate at Churchill College, Cambridge. Mr. Stoneman will be investigating the artistic contributions of Evelyn Waugh, including his art criticism, illustrations, photography, and woodcuts, and how this work embraces William Morris’s theories. Waugh’s criticism of modern society’s social and aesthetic standards all resonate with the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts Movement.