Tulips in William Morris Designs

The Tulip Designs on Record

The most fully described example is a furnishing fabric in the V&A's collection. The V&A records it as titled 'Tulip', designed by William Morris for Morris & Co., dated 1875, and made of block-printed cotton.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds three further works with Morris named as designer. According to the Met's record, its printed cotton textile titled 'Tulip' has the design registered in 1875 and printed between 1877 and 1917. The Met also dates a wallpaper titled 'Wild Tulip' to 1884, block-printed in distemper colors, and holds a wool rug titled 'Tulip and Lily' designed around 1875.

Together these four objects place the tulip on cotton, on paper and on wool, in both flat pattern and rug form. The motif is not confined to one technique or one decade, though every dated example falls within the 1870s and 1880s.

How the Tulip Is Drawn

The V&A's description of the 'Tulip' fabric is the clearest account of the motif's appearance in the record. The pairing of the tulip with acanthus leaves matters for anyone tracing Morris's plant vocabulary, and the story of the Acanthus Leaf covers that motif in its own right.

The records also give a sense of scale. The Met's 'Tulip' cotton measures 32 by 14 1/2 inches, or 81.3 by 36.8 cm, and is classified as a printed textile. The 'Wild Tulip' wallpaper sheet measures 27 by 21 1/2 inches, or 68.6 by 54.6 cm. The 'Tulip and Lily' rug measures 57 by 38 1/2 inches, or 144.8 by 97.8 cm, and is classified as a textile rug.

A note on botanical reading: no identification source for the tulip forms is supplied in the records used here. Any statement that a given flower shape matches a particular tulip species would be observation only, not a documented identification. The descriptions above stick to what the museum records state.

Design by Design: The Documented Examples

The table below gathers the four documented tulip designs side by side, with maker, medium, dating and measurements as the records give them. According to the Victoria and Albert Museum, it holds a furnishing fabric titled 'Tulip', designed by William Morris for Morris & Co., dated 1875, made of block-printed cotton, and the museum also gives this fabric a production date range of 1875 to 1919. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for its part, holds a printed cotton textile titled 'Tulip' with William Morris listed as designer, design registered 1875 and printed 1877 to 1917, a wallpaper titled 'Wild Tulip' designed by William Morris and dated 1884, and a wool rug titled 'Tulip and Lily' designed by William Morris around 1875. Two points stand out. First, the two 'Tulip' textiles are distinct objects in different collections, one a furnishing fabric and one a printed cotton, and their dating is given differently by each museum. Second, the 'Wild Tulip' wallpaper and the 'Tulip and Lily' rug carry separate titles, so the record treats them as distinct designs rather than variants of one pattern.

For a closer reading of the three wallpaper and fabric titles, [the comparison of Morris's three tulip designs](L5) sets 'Tulip', 'Garden Tulip' and 'Wild Tulip' against each other in detail. The chintz pairing of the flower with another plant has its own page too, covering [Tulip and Willow in detail](L6). For the wider botanical context, see [Flowers in William Morris Designs: A Botanical Guide](L1).

Dating Questions the Records Leave Open

The sources disagree in places, and it is more useful to say so than to smooth the differences away. For the 'Tulip' furnishing fabric, the V&A gives a production date of 1875 and also a production date range of 1875 to 1919. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for its own 'Tulip' cotton, gives the design as registered in 1875 and printed between 1877 and 1917. The two museums are describing different objects, but both suggest a design originating in 1875 with a long subsequent printing life.

A second point concerns the pattern book containing the 'Willow Bough' specimens. The V&A states that these specimens belong to 'Volume 2', a pattern book containing 27 Morris & Co. patterns, and that the 'Willow Bough' wallpaper was designed by William Morris, printed by Jeffrey & Co. for Morris & Co., and first issued 1887. The record supplied does not give a date range for the contents of the pattern book, so any broader dating of the volume as a whole would go beyond what the sources here state.

The practical lesson for anyone dating a Morris design from a single museum label is to check whether the institution gives one date or a range, and whether a design date and a production date are being distinguished. Morris & Co. patterns could remain in print long after their first issue, which is one likely reason for the wide ranges in these records.

Plant Forms Studied at First Hand

The V&A places the 'Garden Tulip' wallpaper in a wider context. In a passage discussing Morris's wallpaper designs, the museum notes that many of them were based on plant forms which he studied at first hand, and it names 'Garden Tulip' among those designs. This is the V&A's statement, and it is the closest the supplied record comes to explaining where the tulip motifs came from.

One limitation should be stated plainly. The V&A's excerpt is truncated mid-sentence, so the full description of the 'Garden Tulip' design and its date are not available here. What can be said is that the V&A records the pattern name and groups it with the plant-based wallpapers. For the broader picture of how flowers recur across the firm's patterns, the guide to flowers in Morris designs gathers the motifs in one place.

What We Cannot Yet Say About the Tulip Motif

No source in the record states whether William Morris wrote anything about tulips. If he did, it is not documented on this page, and no quotation is offered here for that reason.

No named author or institution offers an interpretation of the tulip motif in Morris's designs in the material used for this study. Any claim about what the tulip symbolised, or why Morris favoured it, would be unsupported. The same caution applies to links between the designs: no evidence connects the 'Tulip' fabrics, the 'Wild Tulip' wallpaper and the 'Tulip and Lily' rug to each other, and no source lists further tulip designs beyond those cited here.

Several practical details are also missing from the records. The V&A 'Tulip' fabric excerpt does not state who printed it or where. The Met's 'Wild Tulip' wallpaper record does not name a printer or a firm, and the 'Tulip and Lily' rug record does not state who made or wove it. Where a design is attributed to Morris but the maker is unrecorded, it is safer to leave the question open than to assume the firm's usual workshops were involved.