John Henry Dearle
Encyclopedia
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
textile
Textile
A textile or cloth is a flexible woven material consisting of a network of natural or artificial fibres often referred to as thread or yarn. Yarn is produced by spinning raw fibres of wool, flax, cotton, or other material to produce long strands...
and stained glass
Stained glass
The term stained glass can refer to coloured glass as a material or to works produced from it. Throughout its thousand-year history, the term has been applied almost exclusively to the windows of churches and other significant buildings...
designer
Designer
A designer is a person who designs. More formally, a designer is an agent that "specifies the structural properties of a design object". In practice, anyone who creates tangible or intangible objects, such as consumer products, processes, laws, games and graphics, is referred to as a...
trained by Pre-Raphaelite
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti...
artist and craftsman William Morris
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
. Dearle designed many of the later wallpaper
Wallpaper
Wallpaper is a kind of material used to cover and decorate the interior walls of homes, offices, and other buildings; it is one aspect of interior decoration. It is usually sold in rolls and is put onto a wall using wallpaper paste...
s and textiles released by Morris & Co.
Morris & Co.
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. and its successor Morris & Co. were furnishings and decorative arts manufacturers and retailers founded by the Pre-Raphaelite artist and designer William Morris...
, and contributed background and foliage patterns to tapestry
Tapestry
Tapestry is a form of textile art, traditionally woven on a vertical loom, however it can also be woven on a floor loom as well. It is composed of two sets of interlaced threads, those running parallel to the length and those parallel to the width ; the warp threads are set up under tension on a...
designs featuring figures by Edward Burne-Jones
Edward Burne-Jones
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company...
and others. Beginning in his teens as a shop assistant and then design apprentice, Dearle rose to become Morris & Co.'s chief designer by 1890, creating designs for tapestries, embroidery
Embroidery
Embroidery is the art or handicraft of decorating fabric or other materials with needle and thread or yarn. Embroidery may also incorporate other materials such as metal strips, pearls, beads, quills, and sequins....
, wallpapers, woven and printed textiles, stained glass, and carpets. Following Morris's death in 1896, Dearle was appointed Art Director of the firm, and became its principal stained glass designer on the death of Burne-Jones in 1898.
Critical assessment of Dearle's work underwent a significant change during the final decades of the twentieth century, recognizing Dearle's mature work as having a unique artistic vision of its own. Morris's reputation overshadowed Dearle's work throughout Dearle's career: Dearle exhibited early patterns under Morris's name and Dearle designs continue to be sold as Morris patterns. Dearle always remained close to Morris's esthetic, yet from the 1890s onward Dearle incorporated a distinctive set of Persian and Turkish
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
influences.
Career
Stained glass
The term stained glass can refer to coloured glass as a material or to works produced from it. Throughout its thousand-year history, the term has been applied almost exclusively to the windows of churches and other significant buildings...
workshop, where he worked mornings and studied design in the afternoons. Morris recognized Dearle's talents as a draftsman, and took him on as his tapestry apprentice. Morris had finished his first solo effort at tapestry in September 1879, and shortly thereafter Morris and Dearle set up a tapestry loom at Queen Square. Dearle executed Morris and Co.'s first figural tapestry from a design by Walter Crane
Walter Crane
Walter Crane was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most prolific and influential children’s book creator of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of...
in 1883. Dearle was soon responsible for the training of all tapestry apprentices in the workshop and partnered with Morris on designing details such as fabric patterns and floral backgrounds for tapestries based on figure drawings or cartoons by Burne-Jones (some of them repurposed from stained glass cartoons) and animal figures by Philip Webb
Philip Webb
Another Philip Webb — Philip Edward Webb was the architect son of leading architect Sir Aston Webb. Along with his brother, Maurice, he assisted his father towards the end of his career....
.
In the late 1880s, Dearle began designing repeating patterns for wallpapers and textiles, and it is likely that his designs for large-scale embroideries also date from around this time.
From 1890, Dearle was head designer for the firm, handling interior design commissions and supervising the tapestry, weaving
Weaving
Weaving is a method of fabric production in which two distinct sets of yarns or threads are interlaced at right angles to form a fabric or cloth. The other methods are knitting, lace making and felting. The longitudinal threads are called the warp and the lateral threads are the weft or filling...
, and fabric-printing departments at Merton Abbey
Merton Abbey Mills
Merton Abbey Mills is a former textile factory in the parish of Merton in London, England near the site of the medieval Merton Priory, now the home of a variety of businesses, mostly retailers....
He was appointed Art Director of Morris & Co. following Morris's death in 1896. Dearle managed the company's textile works at Merton Abbey until his death in 1932.
Designs
Fabric and wallpaper designs attributed to Henry Dearle include Cherwell (registered 1887), Trent (1888), Persian Brocatel (c. 1890), Daffodil (c. 1891), Compton (1896), Tulip (1895-1900), Artichoke (1897), and Persian or New Persian (1905).Dearle also designed embroidery panels for screens and portiere
Portiere
A portière is a hanging placed over a door or over the doorless entrance to a room. Its name is derived from the French word for door, porte . From Asia it came to Europe at a remote date. It is known to have been in use in Europe in the 4th century , and was probably introduced much earlier...
s in the Art Needlework
Art needlework
Art needlework was a type of surface embroidery popular in the later nineteenth century under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts Movement....
style under the tutelage of May Morris
May Morris
Mary "May" Morris was an English artisan, embroidery designer, socialist, and editor. She was the younger daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite artist and designer William Morris and his wife and artists' model Jane Morris....
, including Anemone (1895-90), and the well-known Owl and Pigeon (or Partridge) (c. 1895). Examples of the latter two designs worked on "Oak" silk damask grounds by Mrs. Battye are in the Victoria and Albert Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...
.
Critical assessment
Arts and Crafts movement
Arts and Crafts was an international design philosophy that originated in England and flourished between 1860 and 1910 , continuing its influence until the 1930s...
s and the major Morris retrospective of 1899, and even today many Dearle designs are popularly offered as "William Morris" patterns.
As late as 1981, the catalog of an exhibit of Morris & Co. textiles dismissed Dearle's style as "rarely more than a pastiche of his master's", citing as a source Lewis F. Day's assessment of 1905.. But by 1989, textile historians had begun recognizing Dearle's talents as a designer. Linda Parry, a curator of textiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum, has suggested that the incorporation of Near
Near East
The Near East is a geographical term that covers different countries for geographers, archeologists, and historians, on the one hand, and for political scientists, economists, and journalists, on the other...
and Middle East
Middle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
ern designs in Morris & Co. textiles from the late 1880s may show the influence of Dearle's taste. Parry identifies Dearle's mature artistic voice from the 1890s in designs such as Seaweed wallpaper, Tulip woven fabric and Eden printed cotton , the latter reflecting Dearle's interest in Turkish
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
and Persian textiles in the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert)..