Nature Without Symbolism: What Morris Said About Meaning in Pattern

The short answer: sources of inspiration are documented, meanings are not

If you want to know what a Morris pattern means, the honest institutional answer is that the record documents sources, not messages. According to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the main source of the patterns for Morris's famous wallpapers was the plants he had observed since childhood, and Morris also took inspiration from images of plants in illuminated manuscripts, tapestries, woodcuts and historical books, and owned copies of several 16th- and 17th-century herbals including John Gerarde's The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597). That account is built around lineage: which plants he looked at, which books he owned, which historical objects he studied or copied.

This matters because a great deal of writing about Morris patterns treats them as coded statements. Some readings may be sound, but a symbolic meaning needs a named author behind it, whether Morris himself or a published scholar. The claims used on this page come from the V&A and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and neither record, in the excerpts available here, states that Morris's patterns carry symbolic content. It also does not state that they are free of it. The record is simply silent on that question.

What the V&A record actually says about Morris's pattern sources

According to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the plants Morris had observed since childhood were the main source of the patterns for his famous wallpapers. The starting point was observation, not a treatise on emblematics.

The V&A also records that Morris 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. That is a concrete, checkable claim about his library and his sources, and it is the kind of claim the record does make.

Notice what this account does not contain. It does not say that a given flower stands for a given virtue, or that a repeated motif encodes a private doctrine. It says where the drawing came from. The same pattern holds throughout the rest of the evidence below: the further a claim gets from source-tracing, the thinner the documentation becomes.

Daisy and the early flower patterns: tracing a source, not a message

'Daisy' is a good test case. The V&A dates it as the first wallpaper issued by Morris, Faulkner, Marshall & Co., in 1864, printed as a simple flat motif on a neutral ground suggestive of grass. That description tells you what the pattern looks like and when it appeared.

It also has a documented ancestor. According to the V&A, the source of the central flower image in 'Daisy' can be seen in a wall hanging illustrated in a 15th-century illuminated version of a text. Here is a motif with a traceable lineage reaching back to a specific kind of medieval object, and the explanation offered is genealogical rather than allegorical.

Morris's tiles point the same way. The V&A records that the 'Primrose' and 'Daisy' tiles show his early preoccupation with repeat patterns of small clumps of flowers and the visual influence of medieval herbals. In the firm's tile panels more broadly, paintings of figures sit on flat-pattern backgrounds as in many medieval manuscripts, and Morris often designed those backgrounds. In each case the medieval connection is a matter of compositional habit and borrowed imagery, not hidden meaning.

Two supporting details round out the picture of this early period. Soon after 1862, Morris wrote to prospective clients mentioning his firm's revival of the art of painting on china tiles, according to the V&A. Tiles were the least expensive of the firm's products and were used to decorate fireplaces, furniture and walls, with designs painted onto plain blanks produced by other firms and fired in a stained-glass kiln. Morris and his collaborator Philip Webb were frequent visitors to the South Kensington Museum, whose collections were by then rich in historical Italian ceramics, and patterns for Dutch Delftware, a tin-glazed earthenware first developed in the 17th century with simple stylised scenes often painted in vibrant blue on white, formed another influential tradition.

Wandle and the borrowed pattern: substitution, not allegory

According to the V&A, the textile 'Wandle' of 1884 is Morris's most ambitious repeat in terms of scale, and the striped barber's pole motif within it has definite medieval origins.

The V&A identifies the main inspiration precisely. It was a 16th-century Italian brocaded velvet acquired by the South Kensington Museum in 1883, a year when Morris was helping the museum select pieces to purchase. In adapting the velvet's pattern, Morris substituted large stylised chrysanthemum heads for the crowns in the original. That is a documented design decision, and it is instructive: the record identifies a source and a substitution, not a symbolic meaning.

The documented picture is of Morris looking at a particular object, in a museum he helped to buy for, and making deliberate substitutions within its structure. Anyone proposing a symbolic reading of the chrysanthemums would need to explain why the documented explanation, a crown swap within a borrowed repeat, is not sufficient.

Where symbolism does appear in the evidence: Burne-Jones, not Morris

The contrast that clarifies the question is Edward Burne-Jones. According to the V&A, Burne-Jones's paintings and designs played an important part in the Aesthetic Movement and the history of international Symbolism. When the record wants to talk about Symbolism in this circle, it talks about Burne-Jones.

In 'The Pilgrim Outside the Garden of Idleness', the V&A states that the Pilgrim's white robes symbolise purity, and that he contemplates the allegories of Avarice, Envye, Elde and Sorrowe. The painting is based on a section of a needlework frieze executed for Rounton Grange, Northallerton, Yorkshire, in the late 1870s, inspired by Chaucer's The Romaunt of the Rose. Burne-Jones's son Philip recorded that studio assistants did the preliminary painting and that much was still awaiting Burne-Jones's input at his death.

Further works carry comparable documentation. In 'The Garden of the Hesperides', Burne-Jones reduced the three daughters of Hesperus to two, apparently in the interests of symmetry, according to the V&A. The work was made as an overmantel for a cottage in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, and platinum was used in addition to gold leaf in the gilding. 'Cupid's Hunting Fields', an oil painting of 1880, was purchased from the artist by Constantine Alexander Ionides on April 20, 1884, for £250 and bequeathed to the V&A in 1900.

This is what a sourced symbolic reading looks like. A named institution, a specific object, and a stated meaning attached to a specific element. The same apparatus simply does not exist for Morris's patterns in the records used here.

Common misconceptions, and what this page cannot tell you

Honest limits first, because they define how far any reader should trust a claim about meaning in Morris patterns:

Four gaps in the evidence are worth keeping in view.

• No verbatim quotation by William Morris on the meaning of his patterns appears in the evidence behind this page. Any article quoting Morris on pattern symbolism needs to show where the words come from.
• The V&A excerpts used here describe sources of inspiration. They do not state whether the patterns carry symbolic meaning, and they do not contain a statement that the patterns are without symbolism. The silence runs in both directions.
• The full title of the 15th-century illuminated manuscript containing the wall hanging behind 'Daisy' is truncated in the record, so the source can be characterised but not fully named.
• The firm that produced the plain tile blanks used by Morris's firm is not named in the evidence, which says only that they were made by other firms.

The practical conclusion follows from those limits. A symbolic reading of a specific Morris pattern, without a named scholar or a documented statement by Morris, should be treated as speculation. Source-tracing, by contrast, can be checked against museum records and is the sounder basis for understanding the designs Philip Webb's drawings of birds and animals follow the same documented pattern of collaboration.

Why the distinction matters for looking at Morris's work

The documented story of Morris's patterns is a story of looking. Plants observed since childhood, herbals on his own shelves, a 15th-century wall hanging, a brocaded velvet in the South Kensington Museum. Each documented claim on this page is a claim about that chain of looking, and each can be verified in a museum record.

Symbolic interpretation, where it is documented in this circle, belongs to figure subjects and carries named attributions, as the V&A's account of Burne-Jones and international Symbolism shows. Where no such attribution exists, as with Morris's patterns in the evidence here, the disciplined response is to describe the pattern, name its sources, and stop. That is not a loss. It is what makes the source-tracing claims about Morris's work so unusually solid.

A note on the evidence base for this page: museum records consulted for the surrounding research included entries for artists named Morris Louis and Morris Hirshfield, who are different figures entirely and are excluded from everything above. Keeping different Morrises apart is part of the same discipline that keeps symbolism and source apart.