May Morris Prints

About May Morris

Mary "May" Morris was born at Red House, Bexleyheath, in 1862, the younger daughter of William Morris and the embroiderer Jane Morris. She learned to embroider from her mother and her aunt Bessie Burden, and in 1878 enrolled at the National Art Training School, the forerunner of the Royal College of Art. In 1885, aged twenty-three, she became director of the embroidery department at Morris & Co., where she designed and supervised embroideries until her father's death in 1896; many of her designs were long credited to him. She was a leading figure in art needlework, the free-hand, finely shaded silk embroidery that the Arts and Crafts movement set against the counted Berlin woolwork of the period. In 1907 she co-founded the Women's Guild of Arts, because the Art Workers' Guild did not admit women, and between 1910 and 1915 she edited her father's Collected Works in twenty-four volumes. She died at Kelmscott Manor in 1938. Her designs share her father's love of climbing plants and English flowers, drawn with a lighter, more open line.