Carnations in William Morris Designs

Carnations in the documented record

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a wall hanging titled Acanthus, designed by William Morris around 1880, museum number O89352. According to the V&A's record, the hanging is cotton embroidered with silks, and its pattern includes carnations, peonies, tulips, briony and other flowers and leaves. This is the clearest documented appearance of the carnation motif in the records checked for this study.

The second documented object is a tablecloth titled Vine Leaf. The V&A attributes it to May Morris, probably designed in 1896, museum number O89466. The museum records that the cloth was worked by Mrs Laurence Hodson or in the Morris and Co. workshops around 1896 in England, so the attribution and the makers are both given with some caution.

The Vine Leaf record describes a central design that disperses outwards with a row of carnation heads and rose branches. The cloth is linen with silk embroidery, worked in darning stitch, stem stitch and satin stitch, with a blue art silk lining. The table below compares the two objects side by side.

Both objects are embroideries held by the same museum, which makes comparison straightforward. Both also place carnations alongside other flowers rather than building a design around them alone, which is worth keeping in mind when reading the motif.

How the carnation is drawn in these two works

In the Acanthus hanging, the carnations sit within a silk embroidery on cotton, alongside peonies, tulips and briony. The V&A's record lists the flowers but does not describe the drawing of each one, so any comment on the carnation heads themselves is observation rather than documented fact.

In the Vine Leaf tablecloth, the carnation heads form a row within a design that disperses outwards, worked in darning stitch, stem stitch and satin stitch on linen with silk. The three stitches give an embroiderer several ways to model a rounded flower head, from the dense fill of satin stitch to the linear texture of darning. Again, the museum record names the stitches but not the botanical character of the drawing.

One point needs flagging plainly: no source checked states whether the flowers in either work are stylised carnations or botanically accurate ones. The identification of the motif as a carnation comes from the museum records themselves, and anything beyond that would be labelled observation.

What the sources do not settle

Several natural questions about this motif cannot be answered from the records checked, and it is better to say so than to fill the gaps. The list below sets out what remains open.

Questions the checked records leave open:

• No design titled Carnations appears in the records checked, so the motif cannot be tied to a named pattern.
• No botanical identification source is given for the carnation motif in either object.
• No named author or institution offers an interpretation of the carnation motif, so no symbolic meaning can be stated here.
• No writing by William Morris on carnations is documented in the records checked, so the question of whether he wrote about the flower remains unanswered.
• The records do not state whether the flowers are stylised or botanically accurate.

These gaps do not weaken the two documented examples. They simply mark the boundary between what museum records establish and what would need new evidence, such as a design register entry or a published commentary, to settle.

Flowers that share the pattern with carnations

If you enjoy seeing how flower motifs translate into printed form, you can browse the [William Morris Style Flower Prints](LINK:L6) collection.