Kelmscott Manor relationship with its setting, especially its garden. The Manor is featured in Morris' work "News from Nowhere". It also appears in the background of "Water Willow", a portrait of his wife, Jane Morris, painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1871. After William Morris's death in 1896, the Manor continued to be occupied by his widow, Jane Morris (who purchased it in 1913) and later, his daughters. May Morris died in 1938 and bequeathed the house to Oxford University, on the basis the contents were preserved and the public were granted access. The University were unwilling to preserve the house as
Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Bell Scott: That summer Morris and Rossetti visited Oxford and finding the Oxford Union debating-hall under construction, pursued a commission to paint the upper walls with scenes from "Le Morte d'Arthur" and to decorate the roof between the open timbers. Seven artists were recruited, among them Valentine Prinsep and Arthur Hughes, and the work was hastily begun. The frescoes, done too soon and too fast, began to fade at once and now are barely decipherable. Rossetti recruited two sisters, Bessie and Jane Burden, as models for the Oxford Union murals, and Jane became Morris's wife in 1859. Literature