'Iris' a design for embroidery by Walter Crane

1875

Item

Dimension
width: 39 cm
length: 57.5 cm
(check)
Medium: gouache/ watercolour/ body-colour on paper

Crane, Walter (Mr): Walter Crane (15 August 1845-14 March 1915) was a prolific illustrator, designer and painter and part of the Arts and Crafts Movement. He was probably the most influential children’s book illustrator of his generation. As well as painting and illustrating he produced designs for ceramics (for Wedgewood, and nursery tiles for Maw & Co), wallpapers (Jeffry & Co.) as well as embroidery designs for the RSN. Crane’s wife Mary Frances Andrews was an embroiderer and the pair married in 1871, the same year Crane met William Morris who became a close friend. Crane later worked for Morris’s Kelmscott press. Mary Frances and Walter first lived in Rome and were part of the artistic scene there before moving back to Britain where they were both involved in the fashionable Holland Park social scene. Crane joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1884 and the Fabian Society in 1885 and provided a number of illustrations for socialist publications. He was a founding member of the Art Workers Guild and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, of which he was president until 1893, and again from 1896 until 1912, following the death of William Morris. In his autobiography (An Artists Reminiscences, p.164) he writes that as well as being on the advisory committee for the RSN, ‘along with William Morris, George Aitcheson […] and Fairfax Wade’ he contributed many designs 'for screens, panels, and other things, in which I introduced birds (notably peacocks), and other animals, and many of them are still worked I believe.' Although he is not visible in the minutes of the Artists Committee for the School it is probable that he did have a more informal role in advising the school.

'Iris' watercolour and body-colour (gouache) on paper, design for needlework by Walter Crane. The boarder shows the side, corner and bottom left of a design of Iris's, growing from a single stem up the side and in a repeating pattern of single Iris's along the bottom. The pattern along the side is contained within an ochre-coloured pattern of fan or dart shapes. The second flower on the bottom has been cut in half, and it is likely that this design has been cut down at some point in its life.

This design is typical of Crane's work which helped define the illustrative style of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The forms, while naturalistic and lively, were flat and stylised enough to be translated into needlework with a clarity of line and colour that made them particularly effective in the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetics interiors for which the the Royal School of Art Needlework supplied furnishings. The Iris was a subject Crane repeatedly came back to and his graphic treatment of the flower here, which conventionalises and simplifies its forms and the waving interior lines of its petals, is echoed in later works for wallpaper such as 'Iris' and 'Iris and Kingfisher' for Jeffery and Co. Those papers were produced just a year or so later in 1877 (Victoria and Albert Museum E.5166-1919 and VAM E.4035-1915). 'Swan, Rush and Iris' (E.5124-1919) as well as a later 1903 design for an Iris textile design (VAM E.2328-1920) are also similar.

Some of the floral designs in this series were exhibited as part of the Royal School of Art Needlework (Later Royal School of Needlework) stand at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876 and later reproduced in the RSAN's 'Handbook of Needlework' 1880 as 'Designs for Table borders'. It is likely these were the 'embroidered boarders; one or two composed by no less person than Walter Crane...easily within the compass of almost every woman' that Candace Wheeler (Candace Wheeler Yesterdays in a Busy Life. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1918, p. 212) was inspired by. Wheeler went on to found the Society of Decorative Art, The Woman's Exchange, and Associated Artists in America. This particular Iris design is probably the design used for an item that appears in the catalogue of works brought back from the Philadelphia Centennial and put on sale in 1876 at the schools showroom in South Kensington listed as 'Two Pairs Curtains, Plaited Linen, Boarder Iris, Designed by W. Crane Esq.' (RSN MS.136.10) Plaited Linen is equivalent to a modern plait or herringbone linen.

Crane's simpler floral designs in the Handbook of Embroidery gained more praise from reviewers than his more complex design Elements, The Times described them as 'generally effective and in good taste' as opposed to Elements which were 'less desirable as examples for broad distribution, due to 'satyrs, serpents, peacocks, pomegranates, snails, grapes, toads, and cornucopia [...] fantastically pressed into service for occult decorative purposes'. (The Times, 11 September 1880, p11)