Chrysanthemums in William Morris Designs

A velveteen full of buds: the V&A fabric

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a furnishing fabric of block-printed velveteen, museum number O90440, which the museum attributes probably to Wardle & Co. in Great Britain and dates to 1885 to 1890. The attribution to Wardle & Co. is the museum's, and it matters: this is not recorded as a design drawn by William Morris himself.

The fabric is a dense study of flowers. According to the V&A's description, it shows large exotic flowers alongside clusters of small five-petalled blooms, printed in shades of pink highlighted in yellow, with swirling serrated leaves in olive green and yellow. The ground is layered: a yellow ground with a brown ground printed over it.

The museum's own reading of the pattern is specific. The V&A describes O90440 as a print of chrysanthemum buds and meandering leaves inspired by the forms and colours of garden flowers. That wording is the reason this fabric anchors the page, and it is the V&A's interpretation rather than an independent botanical identification.

How the flowers are drawn

Taken flower by flower, the recorded description gives a clear picture of the motif. The dominant blooms are large and exotic in character, and they sit beside smaller flowers with five petals each. Both types are printed in pinks picked out in yellow, which keeps the two scales of flower reading as one family of pattern.

The leaves do a good deal of the work. They are described as swirling and serrated, in olive green and yellow, which suggests movement across the surface rather than a stiff botanical grid. On the ground, the yellow base sits beneath a brown printed over it, so the depth of the pattern comes from layering rather than from a flat single ground.

Beyond the V&A's phrase about garden flowers, no further interpretation of the drawing is on record here. The safest reading is the museum's own: bud shapes, meandering leaves, and colour drawn from garden planting, executed in block-printed velveteen.

Wardle, Morris and the Eastern connection

The maker behind the fabric had serious standing in the silk trade. Thomas Wardle took over his father's silk dyeing business and was a founder member and president of the Silk Association, according to the V&A's record.

His connection to Morris was close and practical. From 1875, working together with William Morris, Wardle revived the craft of block printing and vegetable dyeing, and he manufactured textiles for Morris & Co. That shared work in block printing is the trade background against which a block-printed velveteen like O90440 was produced.

On the flower itself, the V&A offers a direction rather than a verdict. The museum states that the chrysanthemum is a motif much used in Japanese design, and that Thomas Wardle was very interested in Eastern patterns, travelling widely to collect ideas. This is the V&A's contextual suggestion for the fabric, and it is the only attributed interpretation of the motif available for this study.

For readers building a wider picture of the firm's planting, the same questions of source and drawing recur across the flower motifs in Morris designs, from garden blooms to stylised foliage. Each motif has to be checked against records in the same way.

A note on scope: the fabric described above belongs to the museum's record of a Wardle & Co. furnishing textile. If you want pattern in the same flower-forward spirit for your own walls, the William Morris Style Flower Prints collection gathers designs in that vein.

What the record does not settle

Several common assumptions do not hold on the evidence used here. First, the fabric O90440 is attributed by the V&A to Wardle & Co., not to Morris as its designer, and the record gives no design title for it. Second, no design titled Chrysanthemums by William Morris or Morris & Co. is identified in the museum records consulted for this page.

The gaps extend to words and interpretations. No writing by William Morris on chrysanthemums is available in the material used here, and no named scholar's interpretation of the chrysanthemum motif is on record in this study. The only interpretation available is the V&A's own description and its note on Japanese design and Wardle's interest in Eastern patterns.

That honesty has a practical use. Claims about a chrysanthemum wallpaper or a Morris-designed chrysanthemum textile need their own sourcing, and a separate page treats chrysanthemum wallpaper specifically. If a source names a maker, a date or a designer, cite it; if it does not, the motif study should say so plainly.