Jane Morris’s creative influence on her husband’s design empire has finally been revealed in a new book
of her obsessive lover Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Jane Morris was essential to the creation and success of her husband’s decorative arts firm, Morris & Co, in 1861, the book will explain.“They needed her soft skills and her embroidery skills, and her willingness to be the pre-Raphaelite face of the Morris company brand,” Fagence Cooper said.
But without Jane’s housekeeping and networking skills, Morris & Co might not have been formed, said Fagence Cooper: “It was set up, basically, around her dining table at Red House in Kent.” For more than 20 years, she then ran the embroidery side of the business which, Fagence Cooper said, became “very significant”.