Jane Morris

Jane Morris was the face of Pre-Raphaelite painting for forty years, an embroiderer of real accomplishment, and the subject of a marriage and an affair that both parties conducted more or less openly. She was the daughter of an Oxford stableman and was living in a slum court when Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones saw her at a theatre in 1857 and asked her to model. She married William Morris in 1859, having been taught to read music, speak French and Italian, and behave as a lady in the interval; she said later that she had never been in love with him. She ran the household at Red House and then Kelmscott, and her embroidery was not a hobby - she directed the needlework side of Morris and Company, revived techniques that had gone out of use, and her surviving panels are exhibited as works in their own right. From about 1865 she sat almost exclusively for Rossetti, who painted her dozens of times as Proserpine, Astarte and Pandora and effectively invented a face that a generation of art then imitated. Their affair, which ran through the 1870s, was known to Morris, who took himself to Iceland while the two of them shared the tenancy of Kelmscott Manor. She nursed Rossetti through his chloral addiction and broke with him before his death. She later had a long relationship with the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. She survived Morris by eighteen years and destroyed most of her own letters. Her daughter May Morris was an embroiderer and the editor of her father s collected works. The other daughter Jenny had epilepsy and was cared for at home for decades. Kelmscott Manor is open to the public.

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