The Church of the Incarnation, Infant Children by William Morris

Incarnation website: “This pair of angel windows was given in memory of all infant children. Their design is strikingly modern. The individual pieces of stained glass have no shadings. Instead, the artist assembled flat planes of vivid colored glass for a collage effect. The outlines of the figures and other details are painted in simple black lines. They were executed by the William Morris Company of London, a leader in the English Arts and Crafts movement. Morris is considered by many as the “father of graphic design.””

Morris (1834-1896) was an English textile designer, artist, writer, socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and English Arts and Crafts Movement. “He founded a design firm in partnership with the artist Edward Burne-Jones, and the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti which profoundly influenced the decoration of churches and houses into the early 20th century. As an author, illustrator and medievalist, he helped to establish the modern fantasy genre, and was a direct influence on postwar authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien. He was also a major contributor to reviving traditional textile arts and methods of production, and one of the founders of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, now a statutory element in the preservation of historic buildings in the UK.

Morris wrote and published poetry, fiction, and translations of ancient and medieval texts throughout his life. His best-known works include The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), The Earthly Paradise (1868–1870), A Dream of John Ball (1888), the utopian News from Nowhere (1890), and the fantasy romance The Well at the World's End (1896). He was an important figure in the emergence of socialism in Britain, founding the Socialist League in 1884, but breaking with that organization over goals and methods by the end of the decade. He devoted much of the rest of his life to the Kelmscott Press, which he founded in 1891. Kelmscott was devoted to the publishing of limited-edition, illuminated-style print books. The 1896 Kelmscott edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer is considered a masterpiece of book design,” according to Wikipedia.

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