Pomegranates in William Morris Designs

The 'Fruit' (or 'Pomegranate') wallpaper design: the starting point

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a design titled 'Fruit' (museum number O250928), an early wallpaper design by William Morris also known as 'Pomegranate', dating from around 1862. The V&A dates the design 1862 and records it as designed by Morris for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, about 1862.

The design shows four branches painted in naturalistic colours: an olive branch, a branch of unripe lemons, a branch of oranges, and a branch of pomegranates. The pomegranates therefore appear alongside three other fruiting plants rather than on their own, which makes the sheet a useful record of how Morris grouped fruit subjects at this early date.

The sheet itself was executed in pencil, pen and ink, watercolour, and bodycolour on paper. That combination of materials is typical of a working design rather than a finished wallpaper, and it is the design stage of this pattern that the V&A record documents.

How the design was made: zinc blocks, pearwood and Jeffrey & Co.

The production history of 'Fruit' is unusually well documented for an early Morris wallpaper. According to the V&A's record, Morris first tried to print the design at his studio in Red Lion Square in oil colours from etched zinc blocks. The process did not work, and he ordered traditional pearwood blocks to be cut instead.

The V&A further records that production of the wallpaper was subcontracted to Jeffrey & Co. of Islington, a firm that specialised in hand-printing. The record as available to this page is cut off mid-sentence on the printing details, so the fuller account of how Jeffrey & Co. carried out the work cannot be given here.

What the surviving record shows is a practical sequence: an experimental method, its failure, a return to conventional block cutting, and the handing of printing to a specialist firm. For a design from the first years of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, that sequence says a good deal about how the firm learned to make wallpapers.

The 'Pomegranate tree' embroidery and the carpet working drawing

The V&A holds an embroidered panel titled 'Pomegranate tree' (museum number O89243), designed by William Morris, England, ca. 1860. It is worked on a linen ground embroidered with wools and couching stitches.

The panel shows ripe and unripe pomegranates hanging from a tree, worked in shades of orange, brown, pink and red wools with brown and blue-green leaves and trunk. Only the top part of the tree was completed, so the object survives as a partial embroidery rather than a finished hanging.

The source of the 'Pomegranate tree' embroidery is not known. The V&A suggests it may possibly have formed part of an earlier series designed by William Morris and embroidered by Jane Morris and others for the Red House, Bexley Heath, about 1860, intended to show Chaucerian figures of 'Good Women'. That suggestion belongs to the museum, and this page reports it as the V&A's own speculation rather than as an established fact.

A third documented example is a carpet design (museum number O1009559) by William Morris, c.1880s, in the V&A. The museum describes it as a working drawing for an embroidery, possibly for a wall-hanging or a rug, with motifs of various conventionalised flowers, pomegranates and other elements, in red chalk and watercolour on both sides of a sheet of calico. The record does not confirm whether the object was ever made up, or which firm would have produced it.

Design-by-design summary

The table below gathers the three documented objects in one place. Every cell is backed by a museum record cited in the claims for that row.

The Met's sheet is included in the table for completeness. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a wallpaper titled 'Fruit (or Pomegranate)' (accession number 23.163.4g), designed by William Morris and block-printed in distemper colors. The sheet measures 27 1/16 x 21 5/8 in. (68.7 x 54.9 cm) and was acquired by purchase, Edward C. Moore Jr. Gift, 1923.

A dating question: 1862 or the 1860s later?

The two museum records disagree on the date of the 'Fruit' (or 'Pomegranate') wallpaper. The V&A dates its design 1862, or about 1862. The Metropolitan Museum of Art gives its own dating for its wallpaper sheet 'Fruit (or Pomegranate)' (accession number 23.163.4g), designed by William Morris, in its collection record.

The evidence available to this page does not establish whether the Met's sheet is the same design as the V&A's 'Fruit', or why the dates differ. The shared title, with 'Pomegranate' given as an alternative name in both records, points in that direction, but pointing is not proving. Readers comparing the two should treat the dates as each museum's own dating of its own object.

This is a common situation in Morris studies: the same pattern can appear in several collections under slightly different titles and dates, and the records do not always cross-reference each other. Where a page like this one cannot close the gap, it says so.

What remains uncertain

Several questions cannot be answered from the record behind this page. They are listed here so that readers know exactly where the documented account ends.

The open questions are:

• The V&A 'Fruit' design lists Philip Speakman Webb as co-designer alongside William Morris, but the evidence does not explain Webb's role or which parts he contributed.
• According to the V&A, the source of the 'Pomegranate tree' embroidery is not recorded. The museum's suggestion that it may possibly have formed part of a Red House series of Chaucerian 'Good Women' figures, embroidered by Jane Morris and others, is the V&A's own speculation, not an established provenance.
• The V&A holds a carpet design (museum number O1009559) by William Morris, c.1880s, which the V&A record describes as a working drawing for an embroidery, possibly for a wall-hanging or a rug. The record does not confirm whether the object was made, or which firm produced it.
• No writing by Morris on pomegranates appears in the evidence, so no statement of what Morris himself thought about the fruit can be made here.

No interpretations of the pomegranate motif by named authors other than the V&A appear in the record either. Under this journal's rules, that means no symbolic meaning can be attached to the fruit on this page. The pomegranates are described as the museum records describe them: fruit on branches, hanging from a tree, or listed among conventionalised flowers.

Where pomegranates sit among Morris's flowers and fruits

Pomegranates are one plant motif among many in Morris's patterns, and this page is part of a wider botanical guide to flowers in Morris designs. The 'Fruit' design itself shows how the pomegranate branch sat beside other fruiting plants, with olive, lemon and orange on the same sheet.

Other flowering motifs have their own studies, including our guide to Roses and a closer look at Tulips, each built the same way from museum records. For a pattern that pairs the fruit with a flower, see Lily and Pomegranate in detail, which examines the wallpaper that combines the two.

The leaf forms that fill so many Morris patterns deserve their own attention too, and a closer look at Acanthus Leaf covers the most famous of them. Reading the motif pages together gives a sense of how Morris moved a single plant between wallpaper, embroidery and textile design.