The Bullerswood Carpet: A Morris Hand-Knotted Carpet

Quick facts: date, makers, technique

Two numbers appear in the V&A's own material: O78824 on the object record and T.31-1923 on a caption. The supplied evidence does not explain how they relate, so both are given here without interpretation. What both V&A records agree on is the date, the two names and the hand-knotted construction.

Who designed the Bullerswood Carpet?

The Victoria and Albert Museum's object record for O78824 names John Henry Dearle as primary maker. The same V&A record lists William Morris as a designer alongside Dearle, and describes the O78824 carpet as the first weaving of a design made by William Morris and his assistant J.H. Dearle.

A separate V&A caption credits the carpet jointly to William Morris and John Henry Dearle, dates it about 1889 and names no primary maker. The two V&A records therefore frame the attribution differently: one puts Dearle first and the other treats the two hands as equal.

No published attribution by a named scholar outside the Victoria and Albert Museum is included in the evidence for this page, so the balance between Morris and Dearle cannot be pushed further here. What can be said with confidence is that the V&A holds both men responsible for the design, with Dearle recorded as the primary maker on the V&A object record. For context on Dearle's documented work across the firm, see the reference list of John Henry Dearle designs for Morris & Co..

A carpet for Bullerswood, Chislehurst

Bullerswood was a house in Chislehurst, Kent, owned by John Sanderson, a wool trader. According to the V&A, the house was built in 1866 and was later altered by the architect Ernest Newton. In 1889, again according to the V&A, Morris & Co. carried out an interiors commission for Sanderson at Bullerswood.

Two Hammersmith carpets were ordered for the house. One was intended for the hall; the other, the carpet now recorded as O78824, was designed for the drawing room. The O78824 carpet forms part of the Morris & Co. furnishings for Bullerswood.

The drawing room itself is documented in museum records from a 1921 visit to Bullerswood, which state that the room appears to have been decorated by William Morris under his personal supervision. The record reads:

The wording comes from museum records of the visit, quoted in the V&A object record, not from Morris himself. It is nonetheless the closest documentary statement to the room for which the carpet was designed, and it ties the drawing room scheme directly to Morris's personal oversight.

Hand-knotting: the Hammersmith method

The Bullerswood Carpet is hand-knotted, with woollen pile worked on a cotton warp. This places it in the group of Morris & Co. carpets the V&A calls 'Hammersmiths', named after the location of Morris's London home where they were first woven.

The technique had a history inside the firm. According to the V&A, Morris believed Persian carpets were the greatest ever made, but adopted the coarser Turkish, or Ghiordes, knot for his own hand-knotted carpet manufacture. His hand-knotted carpets were woven at a thickness of 25 knots to the square inch.

In 1879, according to the V&A, Morris began to oversee the hand-knotting of what the company called 'Hammersmith' rugs in limited runs, on looms installed in outbuildings at his London house. The looms moved to Merton Abbey in 1881, where Morris & Co. produced large Hammersmith rugs for a series of interiors commissions, of which the 1889 commission for John Sanderson at Bullerswood was one.

One point must be left open. The evidence places Hammersmith rug production at Morris's London house and then at Merton Abbey, but it does not state explicitly where the Bullerswood Carpet itself was knotted. The V&A record gives London as the place of production for O78824, and no more specific weaving location is documented here.

What the sources do not settle

Several questions a researcher might reasonably ask cannot be answered from the records available. They are listed here so that the limits of the evidence are as clear as its findings.

Open questions documented on this page:

• No design date separate from the 1889 production date given in the V&A record, and no first issue or registration date, is stated by the V&A or by any other supplied source.
• No plants or motifs in the carpet are identified by a supplied source, so none are named here.
• The relationship between the two V&A numbers, O78824 on the object record and T.31-1923 on the caption, is not explained in the V&A material or elsewhere in the evidence: they may be two records of the same object or records of different weavings.
• No documented statement by William Morris himself about the Bullerswood Carpet appears in the evidence. The 1921 quotation above is a museum record, not a remark by Morris.
• Beyond the V&A statement that two later weavings of the design were made, no details of later reissues are documented here.
• According to the V&A, two later weavings of the design were made, but the evidence does not record who commissioned, ordered or paid for the carpets, or the order details.

The two later weavings noted by the V&A are the only documented afterlife of the design on this page. Any account of reissues beyond that statement would need evidence this page does not have.

Where to see it: the museum records

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds the records researchers will need. The V&A object record for O78824 gives the title Bullerswood Carpet under the name William Morris, names John Henry Dearle as primary maker, gives a production date of 1889 and a place of London, and describes the hand-knotted construction in woollen pile on a cotton warp.

Whether the V&A caption numbered T.31-1923 describes the same physical carpet as O78824 or a different weaving is not settled by the supplied V&A material. Citing both numbers, as this page does, lets readers locate and compare the records themselves.