2-721-218 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

'Decorations of the West Dining-Room, South Kensington Museum', c1865, (1881). Design for panels, depicting female figures and decorative foliage. In the 1860s, museum director Henry Cole hired William Morris to design the 'Western' or 'Green' Dining Room (now the Morris Room) when the young designer was 31 and his firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., was relatively unknown. Morris suggested a scheme influenced by Gothic Revival features and Elizabethan-style panelling, and enlisted the help of his friend, painter Edward Burne-Jones, who used the signs of the zodiac for inspiration - the two female figures represent the Moon and Libra. Woodcut. From "The South Kensington Museum", a book of engraved illustrations, with descriptions, of the works of art in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (formerly known as the South Kensington Museum). [Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, London, 1881]