Bachelor's Button by William Morris: The Story of the Wallpaper

A floral scroll with large acanthus leaves

The V&A describes Bachelor's Button as a floral pattern featuring large acanthus leaf scrolls. That description comes straight from the museum's records of the surviving specimens, and it is the most secure statement available about what the design shows.

Three specimens are recorded under the museum numbers O248847, O248845 and O248842. They are wallpaper samples rather than full lengths, which is typical for the Morris & Co. material that entered the V&A's collections, and they preserve the pattern in a form that can be studied at close range.

Date and attribution: what the V&A record says and where it wavers

The V&A records William Morris as the designer of the Bachelor's Button wallpaper. This attribution comes from the museum's own object records, and it is the only published attribution for the design in the evidence available here.

The V&A gives a production date of 1892 for the specimens, made in England. What can be said plainly is this: the documented production date is 1892, and no separate design date or registration date for Bachelor's Button is documented in the evidence available.

How the specimens were made

The Bachelor's Button specimens are colour woodblock prints on paper. That is the technique the V&A records for them, and it matches the standard method Morris & Co. used for its wallpapers, in which each colour in a pattern was printed from its own block.

The specimens carry physical evidence of their working life. They are inscribed on the back in ink with the title, the number and the price, the kind of marking a firm used to keep its pattern stock in order. The V&A received the specimens as a gift from Morris & Co., so the museum's examples passed directly from the firm into the collection.

What is not known about Bachelor's Button

Several questions about this design cannot be answered from the records available, and it is better to say so than to fill the gaps with guesswork.

The following points remain undocumented:

• No printer or manufacturer is named for Bachelor's Button in the evidence, so the firm or works that printed it cannot be stated.
• No documented statement by Morris about Bachelor's Button specifically appears in the evidence.
• The V&A identifies acanthus leaf scrolls in the pattern, but no source in the evidence confirms that the design actually depicts bachelor's button flowers, or identifies any other plants in it.
• No documented later reissues of Bachelor's Button appear in the evidence.
• No second institution holding examples of the design, with object numbers, is documented in the evidence.

Where the design sits in Morris's wallpaper work

Bachelor's Button belongs to the later stretch of Morris & Co.'s wallpaper production. According to the V&A, between 1882 and Morris's death in 1896 the firm issued a further 35 new wallpaper designs, and the 1892 production date recorded for the Bachelor's Button specimens places the design in the final years of that run.

The V&A's account of Morris's wallpapers notes that his designs centre on plant-based forms and are stylised evocations of natural forms rather than literal transcriptions. The large acanthus scrolls in Bachelor's Button fit that description: the pattern works from plant structure without pretending to be a botanical plate.

Morris himself was clear about what wallpaper should and should not attempt. In his essay The Lesser Arts of 1877 he warned against a particular kind of false naturalism in decoration.

He gave designers of wallpaper the same advice, telling them to avoid falling into the trap of trying to make your paper look as if it were painted by hand.

The V&A also records that Morris described wallpaper as a 'makeshift' decoration and preferred woven textile hangings for the walls of his own home. That preference did not stop him designing papers, but it explains the flat, pattern-first character of a design like Bachelor's Button, which behaves as a repeating surface rather than an imitation of something else.

For the full run of the firm's papers, the complete list of Morris wallpaper designs sets Bachelor's Button alongside its contemporaries.

Related designs to explore next

The acanthus scroll is the defining feature of Bachelor's Button, and Morris used the same motif elsewhere. Our profile of the Acanthus wallpaper follows that leaf through another of his designs, with its own dates and museum records.

If you want to see how the scroll compares with the smaller-scale florals of the same years, our guide to Blackthorn and more on Fruit cover two contrasting wallpaper treatments from Morris's practice.