William and Evelyn de Morgan - A Marriage of Art and Life
With the opening this weekend of the new William de Morgan exhibition at RAMM (the Royal Albert Memorial Museum) it seemed an opportune time to delve down into the stacks to see what I could discover about the renowned potter and ceramicist, so closely associated with William Morris, the Arts and Crafts movement and the whole Aesthetic, er, aesthetic of the fin de siecle. I was aware that we had the book The Cult of Beauty on the shelves of the main library floor. This was published to accompany the V&A exhibition of 2011 which explored the many facets of the Aesthetic movement, and which included examples of William de Morgan's ceramic tiles which were such an essential part of any discerning aesthete dandy's interior decor. What I didn't realise was that William de Morgan was a novelist as well as a potter and ceramicist. Indeed, he was better known for his writing in his time,