HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS
William Morris, founder of the Arts & Crafts movement, liked nothing better than inviting friends round for a spot of DIY. Once, they painted a huge mural of biblical characters on his bedroom wall – Adam and Eve, with a serpent; Noah, holding a miniature ark; and Rachel and Jacob, with a ladder. Morris’s friends included Elizabeth Siddall and Ford Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, all future Pre-Raphaelite artists.
They loved Red House, the home Morris had built and designed with another friend, the architect Philip Webb; Rossetti called it “more a poem than a house”. The red-brick building, finished in 1860, was in Bexleyheath – then in Kent, now part
