Millefleurs Backgrounds in Morris & Co. Tapestries

Pomona: the documented example

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a tapestry panel titled Pomona, museum number O18150. According to the V&A's record, the figure is Pomona, Roman goddess of fruit and trees. She stands amongst flowers and fruits, holding an orange branch and cradling eight apples in her skirt.

The background is where the millefleurs motif sits. The V&A describes the background foliage as being in the millefleur tradition, with strawberries among the plants. So the flowering ground behind the goddess is not empty space but a dense field of small plants and fruit, exactly the effect the term millefleurs suggests.

Who designed it and how it was made

The V&A credits Sir Edward Burne-Jones and John Henry Dearle as designers of the Pomona panel. The record lists both names without separating their roles, so it is not known from this source which of them was responsible for the flowering background. The V&A dates the panel to ca. 1900 and records it as made by Morris & Company at Merton, England.

The making details are specific. The tapestry is woven in wool and silk on a cotton warp, and the V&A records a pitch of 14 warp threads to the inch.

What the V&A means by the millefleur tradition

The term on this page comes from the V&A's own description of the Pomona background, which places the foliage in the millefleur tradition and notes strawberries among the plants. This descriptive use is the only sourced interpretation available here. No other interpretation of millefleurs backgrounds in Morris & Co. work, attributed to a named author, appears in the sources checked.

One limit of the record should be flagged. The source excerpt breaks off after the word strawberries, so the full list of plants identified in the Pomona background is unknown. Readers who want the wider plant vocabulary of Morris's work can look at wildflowers in Morris in detail, or at a closer look at foliage in Morris patterns for the leaf and scroll forms that often surround flowering grounds.

What the evidence does not settle

Several questions cannot be answered from the sources checked for this page, and it is better to say so than to fill the gaps with guesswork.

Open questions the evidence leaves unresolved:

• Which other Morris & Co. designs show millefleurs backgrounds, beyond the single documented example Pomona (O18150).
• Whether William Morris wrote about millefleurs backgrounds, and if so in which texts. No such writing is documented in the sources checked.
• Which interpretations of millefleurs backgrounds exist and who proposed them, other than the V&A's descriptive use of the term millefleur tradition.
• Whether the millefleur background in Pomona should be credited to Burne-Jones, to Dearle, or to both, since the V&A record lists both as designers without separating their roles.

Where to look next

To place this one tapestry background in the wider pattern of Morris plant imagery, the parent guide to flowers in Morris designs collects the botanical motifs across wallpapers, textiles and prints. For the leafy structures that frame flowering grounds, the foliage page is the natural companion read.

If you want the flowering-ground look on a wall, the William Morris style flower prints collection gathers related botanical designs in print form.