Study for composition: possibly "Tristram and Iseult"

William Morris

Date: c. 1858 - 59

Materials: Pencil, with brush and brown ink

Morris starts to paint

After abandoning plans both to enter the Church and to become an architect, William Morris was persuaded by Rossetti to take up painting, along with his Oxford friend Edward Burne-Jones. "Rossetti says I ought to paint, he says I shall be able", Morris wrote to a friend in July 1856; "I don't hope much, I must say, yet I will try my best".

Before embarking on his final career as a designer and writer, Morris completed one oil painting, a portrait of his future wife Jane Burden as 'La Belle Iseult' (Tate Gallery, London), and began at least one other, also on the Arthurian theme of Tristram and Iseult. 

Morte d'Arthur

The two or three major figures against a background perhaps including the mast and rigging of a ship suggest a possible treatment of the episode in Malory's 'Morte d'Arthur' in which Tristram accompanies Iseult on the voyage to Cornwall, where she is to marry King Mark.