Animals in Morris & Co. Tapestries: Deer, Lions, Hares and More

The Forest: the documented tapestry of animals

The Victoria and Albert Museum records The Forest as a tapestry, museum number O89213, with William Morris as primary maker and a primary date of 1887, made in England. According to the V&A, it was designed by William Morris, Philip Webb and John Henry Dearle, and woven at Merton Abbey by William Knight, John Martin and William Sleath in 1887.

The V&A describes the technique as tapestry woven wool and silk on a cotton warp. This matters for anyone assessing the texture of the animals: they are not printed or embroidered figures but woven shapes, integrated into the cloth itself. The museum describes the imagery as birds, animals and flowers within a dense cover of trailing acanthus leaves, with an embroidered inscription.

The three named weavers were not a casual crew. The V&A identifies them as Morris & Co.'s three most senior weavers, which gives some sense of the status the firm attached to this large figurative work. Beyond that, the record is specific about the making and general about the imagery, and it is worth keeping that difference in mind.

Who drew the animals: Webb, Morris and Dearle

The tapestry itself records the division of hands. The V&A states that The Forest incorporates Philip Webb's five studies of animals and birds, placed into a dense cover of trailing acanthus leaves in the manner of Morris's first tapestry, Acanthus and Vine. The fuller story of how Webb drew Morris's birds and animals is a subject in its own right; this page keeps to what the tapestry's record shows about the finished work.

Dearle's contribution is less certain. According to the V&A, it is possible that Henry Dearle supplied foreground floral details for The Forest, although these are similar to Webb's preparatory drawings. The museum's caution is a useful model: the attribution of the foreground flowers is offered as a possibility, not a settled fact.

The material record is precise. The Forest is worked in tapestry woven wool and silk on a cotton warp, and that technique meant shapes were built at the loom, which shaped how the drawn studies were translated into the finished cloth.

For the wider pattern of Morris's work, the V&A states that his use of birds and animals in his early tapestries is a forebear to his later carpet patterns, and calls The Forest one of his most successful compositions. That is the museum's assessment, and it frames the animals as part of a continuous design habit rather than a one-off experiment. The V&A also notes that designing effectively for embroidery, printed and woven fabrics, tapestries and carpets demanded a hands-on understanding of process that Morris relished.

The verse on the tapestry: The Lion

The Forest carries an embroidered inscription, and the V&A records what became of its text: the verse was later published under the title 'The Lion' in Morris's Poems By the Way. The connection between a poem titled The Lion and a tapestry of birds and animals is suggestive, but the evidence stops at the publication fact.

Two things the records checked for this page do not supply: the full text of the verse, and an exact account of how it relates to the animals depicted. The title gives a lion, and the tapestry gives unnamed animals. Any line-by-line reading of the inscription against the woven imagery would need the poem itself, which is not in the evidence here.

Webb's animals beyond tapestry: the Green Dining Room frieze

The same designer who drew the tapestry's animals also worked with animal imagery in a very different medium. According to the V&A, in 1865 Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. was given the commission of designing the Green Dining Room, one of three new refreshment rooms at the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum.

This was wall decoration, not tapestry, and the distinction matters. The V&A records that Philip Webb designed the ceiling and much of the wall decoration of the Green Dining Room, including a moulded frieze featuring the hare. A hare, then, is documented in Webb's work for the firm, though in moulded architectural ornament rather than woven wool and silk.

A surviving design for the wall decoration adds more detail. The V&A describes Philip Webb's ca. 1866 design for the Green Dining Room wall decoration as including a rectangular frieze panel with a running dog, above and below indented panels decorated with plants and sun motifs. Together, the hare and the running dog show Webb placing animals into flat decorative schemes, the same instinct visible a generation later in The Forest.

What the records do not settle

Because this page works only from documented sources, several common claims about Morris tapestry animals cannot be repeated here. It also helps to name the object the evidence rests on: The Forest is a tapestry in the Victoria and Albert Museum, museum number O89213, with William Morris as primary maker, a primary date of 1887, made in England. The broader history of animals in tapestries beyond this documented example lies outside the evidence gathered for this page.

The gaps are specific:

• The V&A description of The Forest names no species, only birds, animals and flowers, so deer, lions and hares in the tapestry are not confirmed by the evidence.
• No other Morris & Co. tapestry with animal motifs is evidenced in the records checked for this page, so The Forest stands alone here.
• No writing by Morris on animals in tapestries appears in the evidence, so the question of whether he addressed the subject in prose or verse outside Poems By the Way stays open.
• These gaps are not a reason to distrust what is documented. They are the boundary of the record: one tapestry, three named designers, three named weavers, a technique, a date and an inscription with a later published title. Anything beyond that needs new evidence.