The Historic Textiles William Morris Studied

The short answer: a historian among designers

The V&A's judgement is unusually direct. It describes Morris as highly influenced by historical patterns and as one of the most knowledgeable textile historians of the late 19th century. That is not a vague compliment. It rests on the way historical sources surface in his woven and printed designs, which the museum traces design by design.

The museum dates this historical turn in his textiles to a specific period. According to the V&A, Morris's increasing interest in historical woven textiles can be detected in his woven designs of the late 1870s and 1880s. The museum also frames the habit more broadly: Morris looked backwards into history for alternatives to contemporary machine-age goods, focusing on what it calls honest work that relied on the revival of craft-based styles and techniques from the past.

So the short answer is this: the best institutional source identifies a documented set of historical sources, visible in named designs from the late 1870s and 1880s, but it does not provide a systematic list of everything Morris studied. The sections below cover the examples the record does support.

Morris and the South Kensington Museum

The South Kensington Museum, later the V&A, was not a distant institution for Morris. The V&A records that in 1883 he was helping the museum select pieces to purchase.

There was a commercial backdrop to this study. The V&A states that Morris & Co. was founded by William Morris in 1875 and produced textiles commercially for sale in two London shops. Historical sources were not an academic sideline; they supplied the patterns a business needed to sell.

The museum also records how far Morris took the revival of craft techniques. According to the V&A, he revived the craft of block printing and vegetable dyeing and set up looms for tapestry weaving and hand knotting of carpets in his own home. Studying historical textiles and remaking them by hand were, in his practice, the same activity.

The Robinson shop visit and Peacock and Dragon

The best-documented single episode involves a London shop. The textile Peacock and Dragon was designed by William Morris for Morris & Co. in 1878, and the V&A says the design was clearly influenced by a visit to Vincent Robinson's shop in London in the same year.

Morris left his own account of what he saw there. Writing about a room at Vincent Robinson's shop, he described it as follows:

What he took from the visit, though, was not a copy of an Eastern scheme. The V&A says the massive scale of the Peacock and Dragon repeat, 109 by 90 centimetres, and its dense texture are far closer to northern European sources.

The surviving object carries this history. The V&A's Peacock and Dragon is a pair of curtains, hand-loom jacquard-woven woollen twill with braid trimmings, museum number O78905, and it comes from a set of four curtains used in the hall at Kelmscott House in Hammersmith, London, Morris's own home.

Designs with this kind of documented lineage sit at the centre of our Morris and Co. collection, where the printed and woven patterns are grouped by type.

The Italian velvet behind Wandle

The clearest case of a specific museum purchase shaping a specific Morris design is Wandle. The main source of inspiration for the design was a 16th-century Italian brocaded velvet acquired by the South Kensington Museum in 1883, the year Morris was helping the museum select purchases.

The borrowing was structural, not slavish. For Wandle, Morris substituted large stylised chrysanthemum heads for the crowns used in the original velvet pattern. The V&A describes Wandle of 1884 as Morris's most ambitious repeat in terms of scale, and says the striped barber's pole motif in the design has definite medieval origins.

The episode shows his method at work. A historical textile supplied the framework of crowns, stripes and scale; Morris then replaced its imagery with plant forms of his own. How that kind of translation works across a whole repeat is set out in Morris's pattern structure, which follows a design from source to finished pattern.

Herbals, manuscripts and garden flowers

Not all of Morris's sources were textiles on display. The V&A records that he took inspiration from images of plants in illuminated manuscripts, tapestries, woodcuts and historical books, and that he owned copies of several 16th- and 17th-century herbals, including John Gerarde's The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes of 1597.

One design shows the manuscript connection directly. The Daisy design, the first wallpaper issued by Morris, Faulkner, Marshall & Co., was issued in 1864, and the V&A notes that its central flower image can be seen in a wall hanging illustrated in a 15th-century illuminated version of a book.

The museum also explains what Morris was reacting against. According to the V&A, he based his patterns on a simplified, stylised version of British garden flowers, in opposition to the naturalistic hothouse blooms of mid-Victorian chintzes. The historical sources gave him a vocabulary of flat, stylised plant forms to use instead. What separates that vocabulary from other period styles is covered in a closer look at recognising Arts and Crafts patterns.

Where the record is uncertain

The evidence is strong for the examples above, but it has clear limits, and one of them concerns the woven fabric Kennet. The furnishing fabric was designed by William Morris and registered on October 18th, 1883. The V&A example is a hand-loom jacquard-woven silk, museum number O89300, and the museum records it as a printed cotton design of 1883 in its woven form.

Who wove it is unresolved. The V&A says Kennet was possibly woven for Morris & Co. by the Macclesfield textile firm J. O. Nicholson, or alternatively manufactured by Merton Abbey or an outside contractor. The museum holds both positions without settling between them, so any account that names a single manufacturer goes beyond the record.

The Daisy source has a similar gap. The V&A identifies a 15th-century illuminated book behind the design's central flower, but the title of that book is not given in the museum's account, so the reference cannot be followed further.

There is also no systematic list of the historic textiles Morris studied. The documented examples are the Robinson shop visit, the Italian brocaded velvet, the herbals, illuminated manuscripts, tapestries and woodcuts.

Why it matters for Morris's work

The historical study was not decoration on top of a business. The V&A frames it as the engine of Morris's practice: he looked backwards into history for alternatives to contemporary machine-age goods, focusing on honest work that relied on the revival of craft-based styles and techniques from the past.

Morris used the language of revival himself. Soon after 1862 he wrote to prospective clients mentioning his firm's work as follows:

The same pattern appears in another craft. The V&A notes that by 1862 the South Kensington Museum collections were already rich in historical Italian ceramics, and that Morris and Philip Webb, as frequent visitors, would probably have been well aware of the technique of painting on tiles. The museum's account of the ceramics parallel runs alongside its textile evidence, and the same habit of study shows in both.

The printed fabrics carry the historical method into Morris & Co.'s commercial range. The furnishing fabric Flowerpot was designed by William Morris in 1883 and printed by Morris & Co. at Merton Abbey Works. The V&A's example is an indigo-discharged, block-printed cotton, museum number O88654. The wider eastern sources behind this historical interest are traced in Persian influence on Morris.