William Morris and Frederick Henry Evans had shared interests in typography, literature and architecture. Evans was a talented photographer and had supplied Morris with lantern slides for his lectures on architecture. In 1896 Morris invited Evans to photograph Kelmscott Manor, his country home in Oxfordshire. Morris and his wife Jane shared the house with the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti from 1871 to 1874, and it remained a country retreat for Morris and the artists and intellectuals in his circle until his death in 1896.
Evans was a skilled architectural photographer, in this series he captures the unspoiled craftsmanship and organic feel that first attracted Morris to Kelmscott. After Morris’s death he assembled a number of these images in a memorial portfolio.
The ‘batter’ referred to in Evan’s caption is the receding angle of the seventeenth century walls on the right, a characteristic feature of the area’s vernacular architecture.
