In Search of a Hero: Morris & Company's Holy Grail Tapestries and the Arthurian Revival

This thesis analyzes the conception and production of the Holy Grail tapestries (1890-1894), a cycle of six narrative panels and six verdures designed by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones and woven by artisans employed by Morris & Company in their Merton Abbey workshops. The tapestries, which depict the Arthurian legend of the search for the Holy Grail, yield insights into Morris and Burne-Jones’s particular conception of medievalism, and thus shed new light on Pre-Raphaelite revivalism. I argue that the Holy Grail tapestries represent the pinnacle of Morris & Company production, and of Morris’s career, because they allowed Morris to realize his longtime ambition to create a monumental tapestry cycle. The project exemplified the paradoxes at the heart of Morris & Company, both in terms of the circumstances of the commission and the manner in which the tapestries were produced. I also connect the subject of the tapestries with the identity of their patron, William Knox D’Arcy. I contend that Morris and Burne-Jones, who made their distaste for D’Arcy clear in correspondence about the project, used the ideals of masculine nobility represented in Arthurian legend to subtly critique the patron.