Morris the designer and maker is Morris the poet and Morris the socialist, for reasons that take us to the heart of his ambitions for the decorative arts and the nature of his practice. His work in the visual and tactile arts of decoration and design takes as its larger subject the workings of a desire for beauty in an often unlovely world shaped by the industrial revolution and driven by an optimistic capitalism. The designs he contributed to the furnishings business he created with his artist friends, Morris & Company, balanced harmonious colour and ordered structure against a complexity that invited the imagination to wander. His designs were intended to function therapeutically, addressing distortions of perception and sensibility produced by the conditions of modern labour and the effects of modern mass-produced objects on workers and consumers. Morris was frequently disappointed in his efforts to create an art for all, both by the economic exigencies of running a commercial business and by the decorative preferences of his clients. Yet in his designs for walls – wallpapers and textiles – he created an art of the domestic and the everyday, an art to live with that refused to abandon hope for a different future.

Red House in Kent, was the only house William Morris ever commissioned and owned. Designed by his lifelong friend and collaborator, the architect Philip Webb in 1859–60; the house stands as the physical embodiment of Morris’s exuberant spirit, youthful ambition, romantic medievalism, and great sense of possibility. For five highly industrious and creatively charged years from 1860–5, it resounded with the ‘jovial campaign’ of decorating and furnishing and creating a garden to meet his emergent taste for rich colour, figurative compositions and complex pattern making. It was also a family home and a place of collaborative endeavour with artistic contributions from his wife, Janey and close friends, Edward Burne-Jones, Webb, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal and Georgiana Burne-Jones. Recent research has revealed lost wall paintings, tantalising fragments of polychromatic patterns and a wealth of evidence about the furnishings, contents, the overarching theme of the interior schemes and a much richer knowledge of the interrelationship of house and garden. This chapter explores the creation of Red House, its complex decoration and its role as a point of inspiration and testing ground for the founding and first commissions of ‘the Firm’, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company (later Morris & Company).

This chapter examines Surrealist curatorial practice from its emergence in the 1920s until the last group exhibition prior to André Breton’s death in 1966. Rooted in the agitational French and German Dada demonstrations that immediately preceded them, Surrealist exhibitions aimed to transform their viewers through an evolving set of tactics that diverged markedly from normative gallery display practices. The chapter proposes that by recourse initially to the discursive, then to the tactile, and finally through fully immersive environments, these complex and often elaborate installations aimed to cultivate sensual, politicized, and postnational subjects. Eschewing those detached models of modernism that aimed either to privilege abstraction or to maintain medium specificity, the exhibitions curated by the Surrealists over half a century give shape to a coherent curatorial practice that engaged with some of the hallmark discourses and experiences of the twentieth century.

This chapter focuses attention on a visual motif that became synonymous with the Reformation; the scales of justice weighing the Bible against the vanities of the Roman Catholic Church. It traces the migrations and mutations of this iconography in English visual culture from the 1570s to the 1670s, examining the contexts in which it appeared and was viewed, including canonical Protestant texts, popular print, domestic decoration and the battlefields of the civil war. It is argued that, in contrast to the pictorial elaboration of similar iconography in reformed continental art, an ‘insular’ process of visual compression enhanced the efficiency and immediacy of this motif’s message of Protestant righteousness. In this synoptic form the imagery served practices of ideological and social cohesion as well as fuelling conflict and division. Like memory itself, the ‘weighing motif’ was repeatedly remade; it was reiterated but modified as it transferred between and across objects, places and spaces. Its success as a particularly memorable motif encapsulates an understanding of the Reformation as both defining historical event and incremental process; while its imagery commemorated a single moment of judgement effecting schism, its persistence and longevity emphasised and facilitated the ongoing struggle for reform.

In chapter 14, John H. Astington considers the building put up at Whitehall Palace in 1606/7, and destroyed by fire early in 1619. Planned in the first few years of the king’s reign, the design of the interior in particular seems to have aimed to create a new style at Whitehall Palace. The architect was probably Robert Stickells. For plays, the king and his family might have wanted to be nearer to the actors; a royal seat brought forward to nearer the middle of the hall would have allowed space for rising ranks of seating to the rear. For masques, the area in front of the scenic stage was required for both orchestra and singers, and principally for the dancers, who performed in the area formed by the central floor of the building. Besides, Astington explains, the room was also used for court ceremonial of one kind and another: it was the largest gathering place within Whitehall Palace. Finally, Astington’s chapter also deals with what is known about the disposition of audience and performance space for these varying events, and suggests some conclusions about the role of the Banqueting House as a multiple-use space at a particular historical moment.