Anarchy and Beauty will be coming to the National Portrait Gallery this Autumn, as it hosts it’s William Morris exhibition; the first ever featuring the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood artist. Titled, Anarchy and Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy 1860-1960, it’s an exhibition with a lot of ambition. It spans a timeframe that starts in the Victorian era and ends with the onset of the swinging sixties.
The exhibition opens on the 16th of October later this year and is set to run through until the 11th of January next year making it the National Portrait Gallery’s major exhibition for autumn and winter 2014/15. As ever, the exhibition will be free to members, supporters and children under the age of 12. Non-member ticket prices will be £14.00 for adults, £13.00 for senior citizens (aged 60 and over), £12.00 for concessions (children aged 12–18 years, anyone registered unemployed, students and disabled people with free entry for one carer). There will also be a family ticket that covers one/two adults or concessions and up to four children (aged 12–18), which costs between £20 and £29.
Featuring a whole host of extraordinary loans from all over the world, which will be brought together in London for the first time, the exhibition goes way beyond just being a significant retrospective. As well as focusing on William Morris’ work, it will also include works by his contemporary artists, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, as curator, Fiona MacCarthy, attempts to explore the ‘art for the people’ movement initiated by Morris and the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
This will be added to by an extension of the timeline that reviews the ongoing legacy of Morris in the 20th Century, looking at arts and crafts practitioners like Edward Carpenter, Bernard Leach and Eric Gill who were inspired by him and the ‘simple life’ philosophy. This leads on to features that show how these radical ideals developed into the Garden City movement, the Festival of Britain and onwards to young post-war designers like Terence Conran who took up the mantle for making good design available to everyone.
The items included in the William Morris exhibition will be wide ranging, showcasing the breadth and depth of the concepts surrounding his work. Portraits, furniture, books, banners, textiles, pottery and jewellery will all be brought together to reinforce the significance of the movement.
For anyone not up on their Victorian-era art movements, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. William Morris, along with Edward Burne-Jones, were followers of Rossetti under the banner of his medievalists strand of the group. The brotherhood wanted a return to an art form that was re-alligned to the abundant detail, intense colours and complex compositions of art prior to the influence of the Italian high renaissance painter and architect, Raphael.
