William Morris and La Vie Seigneuriale: New light on the revival of tapestry weaving in England

Abstract

• The artist and designer William Morris taught himself to weave in 1879 and went on to produce some of the most celebrated tapestries of the 19th century. But how far can Morris’s writings on the revival of Medieval craft be accepted as the ethos behind his tapestries? Previously overlooked evidence suggests that Morris saw La Vie Seigneuriale tapestries at the Hôtel de Cluny in 1855, on a journey which helped form his ideas on the Gothic. He later made the bold claim that these 16th-century tapestries must be considered “as belonging in spirit to the fourteenth century”. Building on research for my new book 'The Art of Tapestry', this paper will reassess Morris’s output and his complex relationship to his historical models in terms of design, technique and philosophy. It will argue Morris’s tapestries were more than a revival: they used the past as a way to engage with the present, re-interpreting historic examples like La Vie Seigneuriale in the process.