William Morris and wallpaper design (2018) | Hacker News Reader

William Morris and wallpaper design (2018)

vam.ac.uk

58 pointsseverine20 comments

Such beautiful stuff! The lines and the colors remind me of another contemporary and one of my favorites, Alphonse Mucha.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Mucha

https://www.alfonsmucha.org/Carnation.-From-The-Flowers-Seri...

William Morris Gallery.

https://wmgallery.org.uk/

It's not that big. There's nothing more there than you will find on the internet. It's cramped for even the not many visitors it gets. It's well maintained. If you happen to find yourself in Walthamstow this and the Vestry House Museum could make an afternoon but I'd not plan a trip to London specially for it.

Is anyone aware of a Wave Function Collapse[1] utility or similar that could take these wallpaper fragments as seeds?

[1] https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse

I quote him probably a few times a year as saying, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Farrow & Ball I think have a collection based on his prints, or at least a lot of what they do is inspired by it.

Morris' good advice is a weaker statement of Keats' last words in the Grecian Urn, where the difference between use & beauty becomes null - & belief is left out of it altogether. Morris loved Keats and towards the end of his life designed and printed a volume of his poems in the style of incunabula: https://twitter.com/Keats_Shelley/status/845227601543118848/...

William Morris was also a socialist writer: https://archive.md/2vgTB

He was a part of a group of people with similar socialist and anti-modern opinions, who were patronized by wealthy capitalists and their wives. One of the things that fascinate me is the relation between William Morris and Arnold Dolmetsch, a similarly-inclined socialist and pioneer of historically-informed musical performance of works from the Baroque and pre-baroque periods. Morris insisted that Dolmetsch's performances were almost the only music he could bear to hear.

Including John "Stones of Venice" Ruskin, no?

Interestingly (or not) a recent Yarvin missive argued that these socialists were dramatically and radically anti-democratic in their leanings. This I find hard to square with their agitating for improvements in the material conditions of the working-class man and their involvement in working men's clubs.

…

Also: I've argued on this site before that there are parallels to be drawn between the backlash to automation at the time of Morris and Ruskin that led to the Arts & Crafts movement and the backlash to automation that our time will engender. Specifically I predict a rise in stuff like bespoke hand-crafted artisanal software, for instance. That's on the aesthetic front. On the socio-economic front the gig economy parallels the treatment of the working poor in the Victorian era. Maybe. Someone more knowledgeable on both fronts could set me straight no doubt.

take a sample of Morris' own writing,

from 'Useful Work versus Useless Toil' :

"Worthy work carries with it the hope of pleasure in rest, the hope of the pleasure in our using what it makes, and the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill. All other work but this is worthless; it is slaves' work — mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil."

And from 'News from Nowhere' (i.e. Utopia) :

"See all round you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives — men who hate life though they fear death."

An American contemporary for comparison:

"experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other." - Frederick Douglass

Hope you get to see my reply

Great quotes.

Does this mean that he had contempt or the condition off the working-man or the working-man himself? I would have thought the former, right?

I think it was likely both. That conditions can diminish a human being is obvious to perceive but impossible to accept. However, if conditions don't suffice to explain, then it seems like there must be something wrong with the person themselves, not just the state of their being oppressed, & this often gets construed as contempt for "people" per se. So, by way of compassion, Morris also had contempt. But I'd say it was more like disappointment than contempt. (Which is perhaps even more provocative.)

I'm not able to speak to your second point; prognostication is not my strength. I do note, though, that Morris and Dolmetsch share a contempt for the common man as he was, as opposed to as they thought he should be, that might help explain their anti-democratic tendencies. I think they also expected society to be transformed by a renewal of what they imagined were artists' and craftsmen's attitudes towards work and leisure, which they thought would make capitalism obsolete. They didn't imagine a political or violent revolution so much as a revolution in priorities.

Thanks for sharing your insights, they're, um, insightful! Don't know what more to say other than that :/

> recent Yarvin missive argued

recent Yarvin massive arguement ?

if you deliver a missive you're usually on a mission!

same roots: https://www.etymonline.com/word/missive https://www.etymonline.com/word/mission

Google missive

Interesting patterns, however, it is notable that all of the natural scenes of green probably contained high levels of arsenic - as that was one of the key ingredients in green coloring during Victorian times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvxnXOoFl20

The article does say, "All these papers, and nearly all that Morris then went on to design were printed using hand-cut woodblocks loaded with natural, mineral-based dyes." Is arsenic classed as a natural, mineral-based dye?

I'd say yes: Arsenic is present in dyes classified as natural, mineral-based, according to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5315675/ ("Natural Colorants: Historical, Processing and Sustainable Prospects").

It's likely not true: https://johnballblog.wordpress.com/william-morris-and-arseni...

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