Enfilade

Yes, I realize William Morris stretches the long eighteenth century to the breaking point. I note the reopening of the museum because of the building itself, which dates to around 1744. The official ceremony marking the completion of the renovation took place on 2 August 2012. The following is an excerpt from Alastair’s Sooke’s response for The Telegraph. -CH

William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, London © Oliver Dixon / Imagewise — The building dates to ca. 1744

. . . Making sense of the personality, achievements and legacy of such a visionary polymath is a complicated task. Yet that is what the new-look William Morris Gallery, which reopens this week following a year-long £5 million refurbishment, manages to do. The gallery occupies a magnificent Grade II-listed Georgian villa, with a front boasting full-height semicircular bays and a white-painted timber porch with Corinthian columns. Situated in Lloyd Park in Walthamstow in northeast London, like a beacon of beauty amid the local asphalt-benighted urban sprawl, the three-storey building was home to the Morris family between 1848 and 1856, when William was at Marlborough College and then Oxford University, where he met his lifelong friend and collaborator, the painter Edward Burne-Jones, as well as Jane Burden, whom he married in 1859. . .

The full review is available here»