Daisies in William Morris Designs

Daisy: the wallpaper that carries the motif

The V&A holds a wallpaper titled Daisy, museum number O248429, designed by William Morris and produced in England in 1864. The museum also holds two further examples of the same wallpaper, museum numbers O248431 and O248432, both designed by Morris and dated 1864.

Its place in Morris's career is unusual. According to the V&A, Daisy was the first wallpaper designed by William Morris to be put into production, even though it was not the first he drew. The museum's catalogue text puts it plainly:

So the sequence matters: Daisy was the second paper Morris designed, but the first to reach customers. For a fuller account of the object itself, see our closer look at Daisy, the wallpaper.

How the pattern is drawn and printed

The V&A describes the pattern as a repeating arrangement of plants with red and yellow flowers on a ground suggestive of grass. The flowers sit frontal and flat against the pale ground, which is what gives the paper its open, meadow-like look.

The technique is documented as well. The wallpaper was block-printed in distemper colours on paper, a method in which pigments mixed with glue are printed from carved blocks. The V&A's example is also inscribed on the back in ink with its title, number and price, a practical record left by the workshop.

One caution belongs here. No source in the museum records checked for this page identifies the plants botanically, so the flowers should be described as the V&A describes them: plants with red and yellow flowers, on a grass-like ground.

Where the Daisy wallpaper survives

Documented examples of the Daisy wallpaper sit in two major collections. The V&A holds three examples, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a sheet of its own.

The Met's sheet has a recorded acquisition history. According to the Met's record, it was acquired by purchase, Edward C. Moore Jr. Gift, in 1923.

The records do not explain how the three V&A examples differ from one another, so this page treats them as three documented holdings of the same design without claiming distinctions the sources do not make.

A documented source: the Froissart manuscript

One influence for the pattern's look is recorded, and it comes from the Victoria and Albert Museum itself. According to the V&A, the source of the flat, simple, frontal motif of the Daisy pattern can be seen in a wall hanging illustrated in a fifteenth-century version of Froissart's Chronicles, shown in an illuminated manuscript at the British Museum (BL Ms 4380, fol. 1).

This is an attribution by the Victoria and Albert Museum, not a claim that Morris copied the manuscript page. It points to the kind of medieval image in which flowers stand upright, face forward and float against the ground, the same convention the Daisy pattern uses. No other interpretation of the motif by a named author appears in the records checked for this page.

What the record does not settle

Several questions a reader might reasonably ask cannot be answered from the museum records checked here. They are listed so the limits of the evidence are clear.

Points the sources leave open:

• No botanical identification of the plants shown in the Daisy pattern appears in the sources, so the flowers are described only as the V&A describes them.
• No text by Morris about daisies is documented in the records checked for this page, so the question of whether he wrote on the subject cannot be answered here.
• The records do not explain how the three V&A examples (O248429, O248431 and O248432) differ from one another.

If you want the pattern on a wall of your own, our print of the Daisy design is a print of the documented Morris design.

Related flower motifs

Daisy sits inside a larger group of plant subjects in Morris's designs. Our botanical guide to flowers in Morris designs collects these studies in one place.

Three neighbouring motifs make good next reads: Roses in William Morris Designs, Tulips in William Morris Designs and the Acanthus Leaf in William Morris Designs. Each follows the same method as this page, working from museum records and naming the source of every claim.