ABSTRACT
Day was clearly not wedded to the idea of decoration being based on pure naturalism and acknowledged the part that abstraction played in ornamentation. This was a position that recognised the declining status of natural ornament and the rise of abstraction. Morris never said that adherence to natural form made amends for ill-considered ornament. As poet, he said, very likely, more than as artist he could have defended. In his work he showed himself preoccupied about ornament, and about nature only in so far as it served the purpose of ornament. From first to last the witness of ornament is, that nature plays a secondary, sometimes an obscure, part in ornamental design, that its beauty is in proportion to its fulfilment of conditions which have little or nothing to do with nature. Natural form lends itself, indeed, to ornament only in proportion as it is reduced to submission; subjected to “treatment” which amounts in some cases to complete de-naturalisation.
