Sunflowers in William Morris Designs

Sunflower heads on the 'Bird' design fabric

The firmest documented example of the motif is a jacquard woven woollen furnishing fabric in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The V&A dates it to 1983, records that it was made by Scalamandré in the United States, and attributes the underlying design to William Morris's 'Bird' of 1878.

The museum describes the fabric's surrounding floral design as showing flower buds, sunflower heads and acanthus leaves. A printed label on the fabric records that it was reproduced for the William Morris Society from an original document.

For readers tracing plant motifs across the wider body of work, this fabric is a useful anchor, and it sits within the larger subject of flowers in Morris designs.

A sunflower, or a marigold? The Wardle dress fabric

The second candidate is a dress fabric of block-printed tusser silk. According to the V&A's record, it was made by Thomas Wardle in Leek in 1878 and shows a repeating floral motif in green, orange and yellow on a natural background.

Here the sources disagree, and the museum says so itself. The V&A describes the motif as either a sunflower or a marigold, and no botanical identification beyond that is given. Readers comparing it with other blooms should treat the identification as open.

The design has a documented source of its own. The V&A states that the motif is taken directly from plate 19 of J.C. Robinson's Treasury of Ornamental Art, published in 1857, from a section described as 'Designs for Textile Fabrics, reproduced from the Pattern book of a Persian Designer'.

The museum also records the fabric's likely exhibition history. According to the V&A, it was probably exhibited by Thomas Wardle (1831 to 1909) in the Indian section of the 1878 Paris International Exhibition, and the Museum acquired it from the exhibition.

If the motif is a marigold rather than a sunflower, it belongs with the marigold page rather than here, which is why this study reports the museum's wording rather than settling the question. The wider context of Morris's floral designs helps readers see where either identification fits.

Designs the record cannot confirm

Two well-documented Morris designs are often discussed in connection with flowers, but the records checked for this page do not describe their motifs in enough detail to confirm sunflowers. The first is a wallpaper titled 'Pink and Rose'. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was designed by William Morris, dated ca. 1890, and block-printed in distemper colors.

The second is the 'Swan House' Carpet. The Art Institute of Chicago attributes the design to William Morris (English, 1834 to 1896), records production by Morris & Co., London, dates the design c. 1883 and the carpet itself 1887.

The carpet has a documented home. The Art Institute states that it was among the original furnishings of the John J. Glessner House in Chicago, designed by architect Henry Hobson Richardson and completed in 1887, where it was located in the hall.

The museum adds useful context on Morris's carpet work. In the 1870s Morris began designing hand-knotted and machine-made carpets, and for the 'Swan House' Carpet he looked to Turkish and Persian rugs for inspiration. That context is recorded, but the presence of sunflowers on either this carpet or the 'Pink and Rose' wallpaper is not, so neither is claimed here.

What the sources do not say

The limits of the record deserve their own statement. No writing by Morris on sunflowers appears in the sources checked for this page, so no quotation from him on the motif can be given.

No named author's interpretation of the sunflower motif is supplied either, so this page offers no symbolic meaning for the flower. Readers used to confident claims about Morris's flower symbolism should note that such claims need a named source, and none is available here.

The botanical identity of the Wardle motif is labelled uncertain by its own source, which describes it as either a sunflower or a marigold. That uncertainty is part of the honest record of this motif.

Sunflowers among Morris's flower motifs

Set against the full range of Morris's plant imagery, the sunflower is thinly documented. The sunflower heads on the 'Bird' fabric appear alongside acanthus leaves, and the acanthus leaf is a motif with a much fuller record of its own.

Readers who want the wider picture can continue to our botanical guide to flowers in Morris designs, which gathers the documented motifs in one place and links to studies of individual plants.