The Acanthus Leaf in William Morris Designs

The V&A Design for Acanthus: A Working Drawing from 1874

In the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection there is an original design for the Acanthus wallpaper by William Morris, made in England in 1874. It is worked in pencil, watercolour and bodycolour on paper, and carries the museum number O78040. The V&A's record also dates the finished wallpaper itself to 1875, so the drawing belongs to the year immediately before the paper went into production.

This is not a presentation drawing made to look handsome. According to the V&A, the Acanthus design is a working drawing on the same scale as the finished wallpaper, intended as a colour guide for the printer, with pencil notes about colours added by the printer himself. That detail tells you something practical about Morris's workshop: the designer prepared a full-scale reference, and the printer then annotated it during the work of printing.

For a closer account of the wallpaper itself, its printing and its afterlife, see Acanthus in detail, which covers that design on its own page.

A Turn to Large-Scale Patterns in the Mid-1870s

Acanthus sits at a turning point in Morris's wallpaper work. According to the V&A, in the mid-1870s Morris moved away from his earlier style of small-scale patterns, and Acanthus was the first wallpaper in a group of large-scale heavy patterns printed in darker colours. The acanthus leaf, with its broad, deeply cut form, suited that new scale: a leaf of this shape fills a wall differently from the small meadow flowers of the earlier papers.

The V&A also makes a point about structure. It states that in Acanthus Morris successfully disguised the underlying geometric structure of the repeat. Wallpaper repeats are built on grids, and a clumsy pattern shows its skeleton. The V&A's judgement is that here the network of stems and leaves conceals that skeleton, which is one reason the design is counted among his most accomplished.

If you are thinking about the design as decoration rather than as history, our guide to styling Acanthus looks at colour palettes and room pairings built around it.

The Motif Across Four Designs

The first three are described in detail by the V&A. The carpet requires a caveat, explained below.

The wall hanging in the V&A was designed by William Morris around 1880 and embroidered with silks on a cotton twill ground (museum number O89352). Its design contains a central ogival shape formed by four touching acanthus leaves, and its lower border shows a central artichoke motif with trailing tulips and acanthus leaves. Around the main field, the pattern includes carnations, peonies, tulips, briony and other flowers and leaves. Here the acanthus works as both architecture and ornament: four leaves lock together to build the central shape, then trail again in the border.

It is a block-printed cotton designed by William Morris for Morris & Co. in 1875, held by the V&A under museum number O225469. The V&A's description records a blue and white large floral and acanthus leaf motif on a yellow and cream ground. The pairing matters for this study: the same 1875 season that produced Acanthus also placed the acanthus leaf inside another design, subordinate to the tulip heads but present in the foliage.

The fourth work is the Swan House Carpet. The Art Institute of Chicago's record (reference number 1974.524) states that it was designed by William Morris (English, 1834 to 1896), produced by Morris & Co., London, with work at Merton Abbey, London, that the design dates to about 1883 and the carpet was made in 1887. The museum also records that the carpet was among the original furnishings of the John J. Glessner House on Prairie Avenue in Chicago, a house designed by architect Henry Hobson Richardson and completed in 1887, where the carpet stood in the hall.

According to the Art Institute of Chicago, in the 1870s Morris began designing hand-knotted and machine-made carpets, and for the Swan House Carpet he looked to Turkish and Persian rugs for inspiration, using a layout with a central medallion set in a field of interlacing stylized foliage. That description describes stylized foliage, but the museum record supplied for this page is cut off before confirming that the acanthus leaf appears in the carpet's design. The carpet is therefore listed here as a documented Morris design with interlacing foliage, not as a confirmed acanthus design.

Read together, the confirmed examples show the motif working at three scales. It carries an entire wallpaper as its subject, it locks into the geometry of an embroidered hanging, and it fills the foliage of a printed cotton. The leaf is flexible precisely because its form is large, architectural and easy to stylize.

What the Sources Do and Do Not Establish

An honest motif study has to mark its limits, and this one has several. The following points are not established by the evidence on record.

Gaps in the record:

• No text, lecture or letter by William Morris discussing the acanthus leaf motif is on record for this page, so no Morris quotation on the subject can be given.
• No botanical identification of the acanthus plant, with a named source, is supplied. The plant is referred to here only as the acanthus, the name used in the museum records.
• No interpretations of the motif by named authors are available, beyond the V&A's design-historical comments quoted above. Anything further would be speculation and is left out.
• The Art Institute of Chicago's record for the Swan House Carpet is cut off before it confirms acanthus in the design. The carpet appears in the table above with that flag attached.
• A complete list of Morris designs showing the acanthus leaf does not exist on the evidence supplied. Other designs may well show the motif, but this page can only cite the four documented works.

These gaps are not permanent. Museum catalogues are revised, and a record that names the foliage of the Swan House Carpet, or a Morris text that mentions the plant, would change what can be said here.

Related Motifs in the Same Designs

The acanthus rarely appears alone. In the ca. 1880 wall hanging the V&A records carnations, peonies, tulips, briony and other flowers and leaves alongside the acanthus, and in the Tulip fabric the leaf shares the ground with a large floral motif. Acanthus behaves as foliage for flowering subjects as often as it is the subject itself.

If you want to follow those flowers, the botanical guide to [flowers in Morris designs](/blogs/botanical-motifs/william-morris-flowers) gathers the whole group on one page, [a closer look at Tulips](#) covers the design of 1875 in which the acanthus here plays second part, and [the story of Roses](#) and [a closer look at Pomegranates](#) cover other fruiting and flowering motifs.