Morris in the Thames Landscape
This spring, with the help of the Morris Society’s Dunlap Award, I conducted research in the UK. The work I undertook there will support my PhD dissertation, “’The beauty of the bough-hung banks’: William Morris in the Thames Landscape, ” which combines art historical and landscape studies methodologies to explore Morris’s personal and creative relationship with the river and its tributaries. It also contributed to a new, related research project on Morris and the Indian indigo industry, the results of which I will present at the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) annual conference this October. William Morris, Wey , 1883. Victoria & Albert Museum. A pattern named after a Thames tributary. My research led me to many collections – from Morris manuscripts at the British Library and the National Art Library, to business ledgers and maps in the London Metropolitan Archives, to indigo samples in the economic botany collection at Kew Gardens – but it also gave me a