Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/De Morgan, William Frend
DE MORGAN, WILLIAM FREND (1839-1917), artist, inventor, and author, was born in London at 69 Gower Street 16 November 1839, the eldest son in a family of seven children. His father was the well-known mathematician, Augustus De Morgan [q.v.]; he was named after his maternal grandfather, William Frend [q.v.]. Both his father and mother were remarkable personalities, at once brilliant and unworldly, and the boy grew up in a home circle full of happy and varied interests, though soon shadowed by untimely deaths. William was educated at University College School and at the College itself; when he entered the College he also began studying art at the school of Francis Stephen Cary [q.v.]. He remained at University College until nineteen, when he was admitted to the Academy schools (1859). Early in the ’sixties he made the acquaintance of Burne-Jones, Rossetti, William Morris, and their friends, and amid this group of artists experimenting and finding new modes of expression, De Morgan, instinctively a discoverer, found himself drifting away from the routine work of the art schools. He began tentatively by designing for stained glass and tiles, but soon felt the necessity of carrying out experiments in their manufacture. Many years later he wrote of these days: ‘I certainly was a feeble and discursive dabbler in picture-making. I transferred myself to stained glass window-making and dabbled in that too till 1872.’ The early experiments in stained glass and tiles were pursued at 40 Fitzroy Square for a year or two, and of this period he writes: ‘The attempt to fire kilns connected with an ordinary house-chimney led to the roof being burnt off.’
After his father’s death in 1871, the sadly diminished family came to live at 30 Cheyne Row; and here a kiln was built in the back garden and a pottery industry definitely established. All the work was removed before long to Orange House in the same row. It was in this Chelsea period that De Morgan rediscovered the process of making various coloured lustres, and developed the magnificent thickly-glazed blues and greens, that helped to make his pottery famous. Here, too, he and Morris made some experiments in mosaics, crowded out, however, by other interests and not pursued. When the business outgrew the Cheyne Row premises, he thought of joining with Morris to take a factory at Blockley, Worcestershire; this being found impracticable, De Morgan followed his friend to Merton Abbey, near Wimbledon (1882), erecting buildings and kilns there and, to quote his own words, ‘retaining the show-room in the Chelsea house until ’86, when the shop in Great Marlborough Street was taken’. He remained at Merton Abbey until 1888, but was then obliged through delicate health to bring the factory nearer his home. A partnership was entered into with Halsey Ralph Ricardo, the architect, and a new factory was built at Sands End, Fulham, the show-room in Great Marlborough Street being retained. This arrangement lasted until 1898; but, in spite of the magnificent work produced, the fortunes of the industry were now waning; and after a partnership with Frank Iles, his kiln-firer, and with Charles and Fred Passenger, painters, De Morgan retired from practical work about 1905, the firm of De Morgan, Iles, and Passenger breaking up in 1907. His late partners continued to decorate dishes and vases for a few years at a factory in the Brompton Road.
In 1887 De Morgan married Mary Evelyn, the eldest daughter of Percival Andree Pickering, Q.C., and sister of Spencer Umfreville Pickering, F.R.S. She was a pupil and niece of R. Spencer-Stanhope, and was herself an artist of talent. More than twenty years of their married life were spent in the Vale, Chelsea, where they bought a little house. The impending destruction of the Vale obliged them to leave in 1909, and the next year they settled at 127 Church Street, their last London home. About 1890 a serious pronouncement of the doctors on De Morgan’s health (it was feared that he had the family predisposition to lung trouble) decided them to spend part of the year abroad, and thenceforth until the spring of 1914 they wintered in Florence. This decision, so serious for the fortunes of the pottery, spurred De Morgan to an invention whereby the tiles, which formed a large part of the industry, could be painted on paper by Italian workmen in Florence and sent to London to be transferred to the clay and fired. In the decoration of the Peninsular and Oriental Company’s liners, undertaken by De Morgan, the tiles and panels were done by this process, which of course could only be employed for flat surface decoration.
When De Morgan’s activities as a potter and designer were coming to an end, a new phase of his life began. A life’s labour with all its brilliant achievements had brought him no monetary success; this now came to him from work lightly undertaken to keep his thoughts occupied in days of disappointment and enforced idleness. He began to write a few years before he actually retired from the business, and he speaks to a friend of ‘this scribbling that keeps me quiet and prevents my being sulky’. At a time of ill-health and depression, Mrs. De Morgan brought to his notice two chapters of a story written some time before and rescued by her from being burned as rubbish. This was the beginning, leisurely and discursive, with no thought of publication, of Joseph Vance and of the series of novels by which De Morgan is known. It was not the first time that his wife’s sympathy and encouragement had helped him in a difficult moment in his life. Joseph Vance was refused by the first publisher to whom it was offered, and a second novel was half finished before the first was accepted for publication in England and America. To the author’s great surprise, Joseph Vance, published in the summer of 1906, had an immediate success, and thenceforth De Morgan, artist, potter, and inventor, became known in two worlds as a novelist. The following is a list of his subsequent novels in the order of publication: Alice-for-Short (1907), Somehow Good (1908), It Never Can Happen Again (1909), An Affair of Dishonour (1910), A Likely Story (1911), When Ghost Meets Ghost (1914).
De Morgan began two other stories which, owing to the outbreak of the European War, he never finished. One is The Old Madhouse (1919), which Mrs. De Morgan, with whom he always discussed his work, skilfully completed, condensing the remainder of the plot and revealing the mystery of the story. She dealt with equal skill with The Old Man’s Youth (1921), undertaking a yet more difficult task in piecing material together to make the story coherent. This latter work is of special interest, as it is largely autobiographical, and full of revelations of De Morgan’s personal character. As the War went on, De Morgan became preoccupied with the question of aircraft and submarine defence, and spent more and more time in experiments and in working out schemes. ‘I have got no end of inventions afoot,’ he writes, ‘though I am not absolutely certain of any but one—a new airship.” He died in London 15 January 1917 from a sudden attack of trench fever. He had no children.
De Morgan wrote two treatises on his craft as a potter: a paper read before the Society of Arts in 1892 (Journal, vol. xl) and a Report on the Feasibility of a Manufacture of Glazed Pottery in Egypt (1894), the latter being the result of a visit to Egypt (by invitation) in the previous year. This Report considers interesting technical points, including the question of kilns suitable for the light fuel of Egypt. In the Society of Arts paper occurs the following epitomized description of his lustre-process: ‘As we now practise it at Fulham, it is as follows: the pigment consists simply of white clay mixed with copper scale or oxide of silver, in proportion varying according to the strength of the colour we desire to get. It is painted on to the already fused glaze with water and enough gum-arabic to harden it for handling and make it work easily—a little lamp-black or other colouring matter makes it pleasanter to work with. I have tried many additions to this pigment … but without superseding the first simple mixture.’
Besides fireplace tiles and pots, &c., the De Morgan ware was used for decorative panels. One such decoration was made for the Duke of Bedford’s dairies at Woburn; another, in which the tiles were used with startling success, was planned by Mr. Halsey Ricardo for Mr. Ernest Debenham’s house in Addison Road. The decoration of the steamships was of a late period, the first work of the sort having been done for the Tsar’s yacht Livadia, years before. Six liners were thus decorated, the Arabic, the Palawan, the Sumatra, the China, the Malta, and the Persia. De Morgan wrote of some of these designs: ‘My pictures represent a voyage of a ship round the world and all the strange dangers she meets with. First she runs on a rock—then an earthquake shakes her off—then I propose to do her dangers from the Sirens and the Sea Serpent, only the Sea Serpent will also be attracted by the Sirens and eat them—so the ship will get off scot free....’ De Morgan’s Italian work had no connexion, as is sometimes supposed, with the Cantagalli works in Florence, beyond the fact that certain experimental pieces were fired for him there, and that a few were painted and produced from his design.
There is a large collection of De Morgan’s drawings and plans in the Victoria and Albert Museum, given by his wife before her death (1919). Among the designs are many fugitive sketches full of spontaneity and movement, and of humour too. Superb as is the achievement of the pottery, the drawings themselves should be studied to realize to the full the quality of De Morgan’s work. His love for the sea shows itself in many of these designs which give curious effects of transparencies and imaginative renderings of the ‘depths of the sea’. There are some fine examples of his work in the ceramic galleries of the museum.
De Morgan had a strong scientific bent, and all through his life took pleasure in problems and experiments mostly in connexion with his work. One of his inventions was a mill for grinding clay for the pottery to an extreme fineness; in fact, as Mr. Ricardo says, ‘the factory was equipped with machinery (for power), and the ovens, kilns, mills, and the appliances were built and devised under his superintendence and from his designs. His power of invention was boundless: almost every article and tool in the place was the outcome of his observation and invention.’
De Morgan had great personal charm and a sweetness of nature that endeared him to all. With a level and sober judgement on men and events, he was never known to speak bitterly, talking of people with whom he had troublesome dealings with a quaint indulgence of human weakness. He was full of jokes and quips, but the streak of tragedy that seemed to cling to the De Morgan family was at times apparent in himself. William was the only one of the large family that lived to old age; these losses and the shadow of ill-health could not fail to leave their mark. He wrote to a relative some three years before his death: ‘You know, I daresay, how queer a life I have had. I was seized with the unhappy fancy that I had a turn for the Fine Arts. I paid no heed to the wisest and best man I have ever known—my father of course—and went my own headstrong way. His words to me were, “If you work hard and read, Willy, especially Latin and Greek, you will live to write something worth reading. But as to painting, how can I tell, knowing nothing of it.” Well! I went my own way and wasted an odd 40 or 50 years. All one can say is, things have turned out better than I deserved. I put a good deal of myself into Charles Heath in Alice-for-Short.’
A portrait of De Morgan, painted by his wife in 1909, was bequeathed by the artist to the National Portrait Gallery. De Morgan is shown in full face, clasping an iridescent jar made by himself.
[Mrs. A. M. W. Stirling, William De Morgan and his Wife, 1922; private information; personal knowledge.]