Thistles in William Morris Designs

Rose and Thistle: the clearest example

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a printed cotton textile titled Rose and Thistle, accession number 23.163.9. According to the Met's record, the design is by William Morris himself, which makes this the most direct documented example of the thistle motif in his work.

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rose and Thistle was designed before April 1881 and the surviving cotton was printed 1917-23. The gap matters: the pattern was drawn in Morris's lifetime, while the cotton in the collection is a later printing. For more on this design, see our guide to Rose and Thistle, the printed cotton by William Morris.

A thistle in the Pigeon hanging

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds an embroidered wall hanging titled Pigeon, museum number O89398, made by Morris & Co. in England. The V&A attributes the design to John Henry Dearle and records the embroidery as the work of Mrs Battye.

The dating in the museum's record is given in two figures: the design dates to ca. 1895, and the V&A records the hanging itself as embroidered ca. 1898 to 1900. Both figures come from the same museum record, so the sequence reads as a design of the mid 1890s worked in embroidery shortly afterwards.

The thistle here is a supporting player rather than the subject. The V&A's description places it among the subsidiary trailing plants of the composition, alongside the birds that give the hanging its name. The museum record does not give a botanical identification of the plant beyond the name thistle, so any finer species-level reading would be observation rather than sourced fact.

Designs sometimes assumed to show thistles

Two other documented holdings are worth naming precisely because the evidence for thistles in them is not settled. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a printed cotton titled Borage, accession number 23.163.6, designed 1883 and printed 1917-23, with the Merton Abbey Tapestry Works listed as manufactory. The catalogue data gives the title and production details, but the record used here does not describe the pattern in enough detail to confirm a thistle motif.

The Art Institute of Chicago holds the Swan House carpet, designed by William Morris and produced by Morris & Co. of London, with the design dated c. 1883 and the carpet made in 1887. The record describes a central medallion and interlacing stylized foliage, but it does not name a thistle. Until a source confirms the motif, both designs should be treated as unconfirmed rather than asserted examples.

Two further gaps should be stated plainly. No Morris writing on thistles is available in the sources used here, and no attributed interpretation of the thistle motif, by a named author, is available either. Where other pages might offer symbolic readings, this one stops at what the records support.

A Morris-attributed thistle drawing

Our shop also offers a Design Drawing Blue Thistle William Morris, a Morris-attributed pattern whose design name is not identified. It shows a thistle rendered in blue, in the manner of the firm's botanical studies. Because the specific design has not been identified, we describe it visually only and do not assign it a name from the documented catalogue of Morris designs.

Where thistles sit among Morris's flowers

Compared with roses, tulips or acanthus, the thistle is a minor motif in the documented record: one design named for it, and one supporting appearance. That makes it a useful case study in how the evidence base varies from flower to flower. Our broader guide to flowers in Morris designs collects the motifs with sources.

If you want to compare how other flowers are handled, see a closer look at Tulips, more on Roses and our guide to Acanthus Leaf. Each follows the same method: documented examples first, interpretation only where a named source offers one.