COVER
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY A.S. BYATT
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
DEDICATION
TITLE PAGE
FORTUNY & MORRIS
THE HOUSES
THE RED HOUSE
KELMSCOTT MANOR
PALAZZO PESARO ORFEI
NORTH & SOUTH
FABRICS, DESIGNS & LIGHT
POMEGRANATE
BIRD
CODA
FURTHER READING
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE BOOK
This ravishing book opens a window onto the lives, designs, and passions of two charismatic artists. Born a generation apart, they were seeming opposites: Mariano Fortuny, a Spanish aristocrat thrilled by the sun-baked cultures of Crete and Knossos; William Morris, a British craftsman, in thrall to the myths of the North. Yet through their revolutionary inventions and textiles, both men inspired a new variety of art, as vibrant today as when it was first conceived. Acclaimed writer A.S. Byatt traces their genius right to their source.
The Palazzo Pesaro Orfei in Venice is a warren of dark spaces leading to a workshop where Fortuny created his designs for pleated silks and shining velvets. Here he worked alongside the French model who became his wife and collaborator, including on the ‘Delphos’ dress – a flowing gown evoking classical Greece.
Morris’s Red House, outside London, with its Gothic turrets and secret gardens, helped inspire his stunning floral and geometric patterns; it also represented a coming together of life and art. But it was Kelmscott Manor in the English countryside that he loved best – even when it became the setting for his wife’s love affair with the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Generously illustrated with the artists’ beautiful designs – pomegranates and acanthus, peacock and vine – A.S. Byatt brings the visions and ideas of Fortuny and Morris dazzingly to life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A.S. BYATT is a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), and the Frederica Quartet; The Children’s Book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999 and is the recipient of the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspriing contribution to life writing’.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
FICTION
The Shadow of the Sun
The Game
The Virgin in the Garden
Still Life
Sugar and Other Stories
Possession: A Romance
Angels and Insects
The Matisse Stories
The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye
Babel Tower
Elementals
The Biographer’s Tale
A Whistling Woman
Little Black Book of Stories
The Children’s Book
CRITICISM
Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch
Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time
Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings
Imagining Characters (with Ignês Sodré)
On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays
Portraits in Fiction Memory: An Anthology (ed. with Harriet Harvey Wood)
Palazzo Pesaro Orfei, Ferdinando Ongania Editore, c.1895
William Morris, Frederick Hollyer, 1874
Mariano Fortuny, unknown, 1900
Jane Burden as La Belle Iseult, William Morris, 1858
Jane Morris as Proserpine, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1874
Jane Morris, John Robert Parsons, 1865
‘William Morris in a bath-tub’, Edward Burne-Jones
Henriette Negrin, Mariano Fortuny, c.1900
Henriette at work in the Palazzo Pesaro Orfei, Mariano Fortuny, 1907
East front of Red House, Bexleyheath, London
Daisy hanging, William Morris, worked by Jane Morris and others, early 1860s
Design for Trellis wallpaper, William Morris with birds by Philip Webb, 1862
Trellis wallpaper, William Morris with birds by Philip Webb, 1864
Kelmscott Manor, as it appears in Charles M. Gere’s woodcut frontispiece of News from Nowhere by William Morris, Kelmscott Press, 1893
Honeysuckle wallpaper, William Morris or May Morris, 1883
William Morris’s bedroom at Kelmscott Manor
The salon at the Palazzo Pesaro Orfei, Mariano Fortuny, c.1940
Short velvet cape printed in silver and gold, Mariano Fortuny
Long velvet cape printed in gold, Mariano Fortuny
Ponte del Piovan, Venice, Mariano Fortuny, c.1905
Sketch for opera costume of Isolda, Mariano Fortuny, c.1900
Froissart’s Chronicles, William Morris, Kelmscott Press, 1897
Fafnir the dragon, Kelmscott Manor
The Valkyrie, Siegmund and Sieglinde, Mariano Fortuny, 1928
Brúará, Iceland, Frederick W.W. Howell, c.1900
‘William Morris climbing a mountain in Iceland’, Edward Burne-Jones
Mariano Fortuny in djellabah and turban, self-portrait, c.1935
Fresco of dancing girls, Knossos, Crete, c.1600–1450 BCE
Cretan workmen performing traditional line dance during Knossos dig, c.1900
Isadora Duncan, George Barbier, 1917
Seaweed wallpaper, John Henry Dearle, 1901
Delphos gown, Mariano Fortuny, c.1920
Trilobite textile, Fortuny Manufacture, after 1909
Velvet cloak with natural forms, Mariano Fortuny
Fruit wallpaper, William Morris, 1864
Pomegranate cloak, Mariano Fortuny
Delphos gown with pomegranate surcoat, Fortuny Manufacture, after 1909
Pomegranate printed textile, William Morris, 1877
Bird textile, Fortuny Manufacture, after 1909
Peacock and Dragon textile, William Morris, 1878
If I Can hanging, William Morris, 1856–7
Strawberry Thief textile, William Morris, 1883
Woodblock used for printing Strawberry Thief, 1883
Eleonora dress, Mariano Fortuny, c.1930
A.S. Byatt at the Museo Fortuny, 2011
A.S. Byatt with a notebook at the Museo Fortuny, 2011
Photographic credits: Palazzo Pesaro Orfei, here, here, here, here, here © FCMV, Fortuny Museum Archive; here, here ©National Portrait Gallery, London; here, here ©Tate, London 2016; here Courtesy of Museo de la Biblioteca Nacional de Espana, Madrid; here ©National Trust Images/Andrew Butler; here, here ©Society of Antiquaries, London (Kelmscott Manor); here, here, here, here, here, here, Willow Boughs endpaper (back) ©William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest; here, here ©Country Life; here, here, here, here, here, here ©Claudio Franzini for Fortuny Museum; here Courtesy of Cornell University Library (Icelandic and Faroese Photographs of Frederick W.W. Howell); here ©Bridgeman Images; here ©Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford; here, here, here ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London; here ©Museo del Traje, Madrid/Photo Munio Rodil Ares; here, here ©Fabrizio Giraldi; Delphos gown endpaper (front) ©1stdibs.com
Every effort has been made to trace or contact copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention, at the earliest opportunity.
FOR GILL MARSDEN
WE WERE IN Venice in April and I was drunk on aquamarine light. It is an airy light, playing with the moving dark surfaces of the canals, shining on stone and marble, bringing both together in changing ways, always aquamarine. I found that an odd thing was happening to me. Every time I closed my eyes – which I increasingly did deliberately – I saw a very English green, a much more yellow green, composed of the light glittering on shaved lawns, and the dense green light in English woods, light vanishing into gnarled tree trunks, flickering on shadows on the layers of summer leaves. We were there to visit the civic museums, and I was very interested in the Palazzo Fortuny, the home of an artist of whom I had known almost nothing beyond the fact that he is the only living artist named by Proust in À la recherche du temps perdu. I grow more and more interested in polymaths in the arts and I have always admired those whose lives and arts are indistinguishable from each other. And as I grow older I become more and more interested in craftsmen – glass-blowers, potters, makers of textiles. My own ancestors were potters in the English pottery towns – the Five Towns in Staffordshire.
As I grow older, also, I have come to understand that my writing – fiction and thinking – starts with a moment of sudden realisation that two things I have been thinking about separately are parts of the same thought, the same work. I think, fancifully perhaps, that the excitement is the excitement of the neurones in the brain, pushing out synapses connecting the web of dendrites, two movements becoming one. Every time I thought about Fortuny in the aquamarine clarity, I found I was also thinking about the Englishman William Morris. I was using Morris, whom I did know, to understand Fortuny. I was using Fortuny to reimagine Morris. Aquamarine, gold green. English meadows, Venetian canals. When I came back to England and started thinking about Morris, visiting the museums that were the houses where he had lived and worked, I closed my eyes and found my head full of aquamarine light, water flowing in canals, the dark of the Palazzo Pesaro Orfei.
They were both men of genius and extraordinary energy. They created their own surroundings, changed the visual world around them, studied the forms of the past and made them parts of new forms. In many ways they were opposites. Morris was an English bourgeois whose father had made an unexpected fortune in tin mining. He became a convinced and passionate socialist. Fortuny came from an aristocratic Spanish family of painters and artists and lived in an elegant aristocratic world. Fortuny’s imaginative roots were Mediterranean – North Africa, Crete and Delphos. Morris was obsessed by the North and the Nordic – the Icelandic sagas, Iceland itself, the North Sea.
Mariano Fortuny was born in Granada in 1871. His father, Mariano Fortuny y Marsal, was a distinguished painter, and his mother, Cecilia de Madrazo, came also from a family of artists, architects and critics. Fortuny y Marsal died of malaria when he was only thirty-six years old – his collections of pottery, armour, textiles and carpets, as well as his paintings and etchings were an essential part of Fortuny’s life and work. After his father’s death his mother moved to Paris, where her brother Raimundo was a celebrated portrait painter: the family moved in a world of artists and writers. In 1889 the family moved to Venice – partly, at least, because Fortuny was allergic to horses, and suffered from asthma and hay fever. There they lived in the Palazzo Martinengo on the Grand Canal until Fortuny bought the Palazzo Pesaro Orfei in 1899. The move was partly because his mother did not approve of his companion, a French divorcee, Henriette Negrin, whom he met in Paris and who joined him in Venice in 1902, and whom he married in 1924.
Morris was born in 1834, of Welsh ancestry, in Walthamstow in a family with no aesthetic interests. He was sent to a preparatory school at the age of nine – he referred to it as a ‘boy farm’ – and to Marlborough College at the age of fourteen where he was desperately unhappy but stoical. He was able to do what he liked best, which was roam in the surrounding countryside. At home he developed a passion for Epping Forest, ‘certainly the biggest hornbeam wood in these islands, and I suppose in the world’. He loved the hornbeams, ‘magnificently grotesque’ as his splendid biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, puts it, and later fought to save the forest from development. He also developed a passion for churches and for the River Thames. When he went to Oxford he became part of a group of friends, including Edward Burne-Jones, who were interested in early church architecture – they were the Set and became the Brotherhood. The second volume of Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, published in 1853 was, MacCarthy says, ‘an Oxford book, the Oxford book, of that whole period when the reading of Ruskin seemed to Morris to have been a “sort of revelation”’. In 1857 he met Jane Burden whom he married in 1859. Jane was the daughter of a stable hand, who had been discovered in a theatre by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Burne-Jones, who collected what they called ‘stunners’, women of striking and unusual beauty. Morris’s marriage was not happy – Janey fell in love with Rossetti, for whom she posed, and with whom she had a long affair, about which Morris, a man capable of violent rages, was generous and tolerant. When, in 1871, Morris and Rossetti took a joint tenancy of Kelmscott Manor, Morris set off for Iceland leaving Rossetti and Jane together in Kelmscott with Morris’s two daughters, a gesture, MacCarthy says, which verged on the sublime.
Fortuny was happily married to Henriette, with whom he had lived for twenty-two years before the marriage. She was his partner in all his work.
I found I was musing on the two worlds, Venetian and English, seen through the images of the women who inhabited them. Morris himself was not essentially interested in painting – he cared for objects, for solid things. He made one painting of Jane in the summer and winter of 1857–8, a tall, slightly gawky woman in pink and white medieval costume, standing unsmiling beside a rumpled bed in which a small hound is sleeping. He is said to have written on it ‘I cannot paint you, but I love you’. In 1858, in a poem ‘Praise of My Lady’, he described her as something with the lifeless quality of ivory and metal. Her hair was ‘thick and crisped wonderfully’ dark and ‘dead’ as if forged ‘Of some strange metal, thread by thread’. Rossetti started to paint her in the 1860s, over and over again, always with the same large, red, hungry, mournful mouth, distant staring eyes, and rich melancholy mass of hair. The Blue Silk Dress was painted in 1868 as a commission from Morris. Jane made the dress herself – Rossetti wrote to suggest that the sleeves should be ‘full at the top’ – and Jane’s daughter May remembered it as ‘a delicious, simple silk gown of shot blue and brown that was a favourite with the little girls’. In this painting Jane’s nervously twisted hands display a wedding ring. In later paintings it is not there. There is something appalling, I have discovered, in looking at a whole series of Rossetti’s images, more and more obsessive yet essentially all the same, brooding, dangerous, sexually greedy, too much. The best, and therefore the worst, is Proserpine where the brooding figure grasps the pomegranate with a bite in it, condemning her to a season in Hades. I wondered two things about this succession – are they the product of Rossetti’s own disturbed imagination, or did Jane really look like that? And what effect did these images of Rossetti’s feelings have on Morris, as they hung in his house or were bought by others?
Photographs of Jane Morris are remarkably like the paintings. Rossetti commissioned a series of photographic portraits of Jane, taken in his own garden by John Robert Parsons. The face is recognisably the face of the painted woman, unsmiling, melancholy, malcontent, beautiful. Her dresses are loose, artistic. I do not have any idea at all of what she was really like. Attempts have been made, mostly by women writers, to give her a separate identity, to make as much as possible of her skilled embroidery. But she remains alien, until in old age her hair is white and her expression resigned rather than desperate.
Henry James describes meeting her in 1868.