How Morris Wallpapers Were Printed by Hand From Woodblocks

What the museum records show

The clearest physical evidence for woodblock wallpaper printing in Morris and Co.'s output sits in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Among its holdings is a wallpaper sample titled 'Indian', a formalised foliate design printed brown on a pink ground, recorded under museum number O78207. The V&A catalogues it as a colour woodblock print in distemper on paper, which is the technical description of a hand-blocked wallpaper.

The same sample carries the production details that make it useful for history. According to the V&A's record, the 'Indian' wallpaper was published by Morris and Co. and printed by Jeffrey and Co., the commercial blockprinting firm the museum credits with executing the work. The sample belongs to a pattern book of 23 Morris and Co. patterns, so it survives not as a loose sheet but as part of an assembled trade record of what the firm sold.

A second documented example is 'Trellis'. The V&A holds a 'Trellis' wallpaper, museum number O248458, showing a flowering thorned rose bush growing on a wooden trellis, with birds and flying insects. The museum records it as block-printed in distemper colours on paper, the same technique as 'Indian'. The V&A dates the design to November 1862, with registration and production in 1864, and notes that the birds in the pattern were designed by Philip Webb rather than by Morris himself.

The O248458 'Trellis' also comes from a pattern book: 'Volume 1', which the V&A records as containing 25 Morris and Co. patterns from 1862 to 1881. For readers comparing individual patterns across the firm's output, our guide to fourteen famous Morris designs gives dated summaries of the best-known papers.

Where Morris's wallpapers began

The commercial setting explains why wallpaper came first. According to the V&A, in the early 1860s the British wallpaper market was booming, with mass-produced papers offering homeowners a cheaper alternative to textile-based wall decoration. Morris made wallpaper one of the first things his new interior decorations company put into serial production, entering an established trade with an established printing method.

The sequence of early designs is documented in the museum's records. The second was 'Daisy' (1864), a simple design of naively drawn meadow flowers, and the next, 'Fruit' (1865), demonstrated the same informal naturalism of Morris's first two designs.

These early papers were simple by later standards, which mattered for block printing because every colour in a pattern needs its own block. A design of scattered meadow flowers on a plain ground asks far less of the printer than a dense layered pattern. The relationship between design complexity and printing cost became the defining story of Morris's wallpaper work in the following decade, and the wider history of the firm's production is traced in our Morris and Co. history page.

More blocks, more cost: the 1870s papers

In the 1870s Morris's wallpaper designs grew more demanding. According to the V&A, Morris created many of his most enduring wallpaper designs in this decade, including Larkspur (1872), Jasmine (1872), Willow (1874), Marigold (1875), and Wreath and Chrysanthemum (both dated 1876 to 1887 in the museum's record). The museum states plainly what this meant for production: these 1870s patterns required a complex printing technique involving a large number of individual printing blocks, making the resulting papers more costly than those carrying Morris's earlier, simpler designs.

The V&A records that in 1880 Morris was asked to redecorate rooms at London's St. James's Palace, for which he created a special wallpaper called St. James's. The museum's account of that paper gives the clearest numbers available for block printing at the demanding end: it required 68 separate printing blocks to create a repeat over two wallpaper widths, with a vertical repeat of 127cm. Sixty-eight blocks means sixty-eight separate hand-pressed impressions for every length of paper, aligned precisely, colour by colour.

The trade standing that such work built is visible in the wider record. By 1884 'Morrisonian' had become a known term in the interiors trade, and Morris papers began to be recommended in many domestic advice manuals and design books. The V&A also records that in 1887 Queen Victoria commissioned Morris and Company to create a special wallpaper design for Balmoral Castle with the 'VRI' cipher incorporated into it, a royal commission for a hand-blocked paper from a firm that had begun with a handful of simple patterns two decades earlier.

What Morris himself said about the medium

Morris wrote about wallpaper design directly, and what he said aligns with what block printing does well. In his essay The Lesser Arts (1877), Morris warned against decorative effects that faked nature instead of working with the medium, a warning the V&A illustrates from the essay itself.

A block-printed paper shows its making: flat colour, visible edges where each block meets the next, a repeat that declares itself.

The V&A characterises the resulting designs as always subtle, stylised evocations of natural forms rather than literal transcriptions. That is the museum's interpretation of the work, and it fits the medium: a woodblock renders a simplified, flattened form well and a botanical illusion badly. One limit should be stated plainly. The evidence for this page gives no statement by Morris specifically about woodblock wallpaper printing technique itself. His recorded comments concern design principles, not the mechanics of cutting or pressing blocks.

Attribution questions the records leave open

Not every attribution in the record is settled. The V&A records William Morris as designer of the 'Indian' wallpaper sample while noting it was possibly designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott. The museum also records, as an attribution rather than a fact, that the 'Indian' pattern is said to have been adapted from an early 18th-century wallpaper by an unknown designer, whose source was an Indian chintz pattern. Both points come from a single institutional source and should be read as the V&A's record, not as an independently confirmed history.

Dating carries the same caution. The V&A dates the 'Indian' sample to about 1868 to 1870 and records it as made in London, but this rests on the museum's single record. Where the V&A's own entries give two readings, as with the designer of 'Indian', both are reported here rather than resolved.

'Trellis' involves a different kind of wrinkle.

There are also gaps worth naming. The evidence does not describe the step-by-step process of how blocks were cut, inked and pressed, does not give block counts for 'Trellis', 'Indian' or 'Sunflower', and does not settle where Morris wallpapers were printed after 1881 or the full relationship between Morris and Co. and Jeffrey and Co. For the related technique Morris did bring in-house, see our page on indigo discharge printing, which covers the slow cloth-printing method behind 'Strawberry Thief'.

A worked example: 'Sunflower' (1879)

One object pulls the arrangement together. According to the V&A, the 'Sunflower' wallpaper was designed by William Morris, manufactured and printed by Jeffrey and Co., in 1879, in England. The museum holds it under number E.513-1919 in London.

'Sunflower' is therefore a concrete instance of the standard division of labour: Morris supplied the design, Jeffrey and Co. supplied the block printing, and the pattern book sample entered the V&A's collection with both attributions attached. It dates from the same decade as the complex, block-heavy papers described above, and it shows the Morris design plus Jeffrey printing arrangement operating at the height of the firm's wallpaper production.

For anyone studying the technique, the useful surviving evidence is exactly this kind of object: dated, attributed samples in pattern books, with the printer named. The V&A's 'Indian', the two 'Trellis' papers and 'Sunflower' are the documented examples this page rests on.