Chrysanthemum Wallpaper by William Morris: History and Design

What Chrysanthemum looks like

The fullest description comes from the V&A record for O248628, which describes the wallpaper as a colour woodblock print on paper showing chrysanthemums and flowers facing upwards to the left and right in alternate 'rows', with foliage. The alternation of direction from one row to the next is part of the museum's description of the specimen, not an inference made here.

The second specimen, O74616, is described in more colourful terms. The V&A record describes yellow chrysanthemums and pink flowers facing upwards to the left and right in alternate 'rows', with green and smaller yellow foliage, produced as a colour print from woodblocks. The arrangement of the flowers matches the description of O248628; the O74616 record adds the colours of the blooms and leaves.

Taken together, the two records describe a pattern built from rows of flowers turning in opposite directions, set among foliage. No other colourways of Chrysanthemum are documented in the records used for this page, and no plant identifications beyond the chrysanthemums, the unspecified pink flowers and the foliage are supplied by the museum's descriptions.

If you want to see how this row-and-foliage approach compares with Morris's other flower patterns, Trellis is an earlier design worth setting beside it.

Date and attribution: what the records say

All three V&A records carry a primary date of 1877: O248628, O74616 and O251142. The museum dates each specimen to that year.

The V&A record for O248628 attributes the design of Chrysanthemum to William Morris as designer, and the record for O251142 does the same. The O74616 record differs slightly, listing Morris as artist rather than designer. The attribution to Morris is consistent across all three records; only the role label varies.

One caution on the date. The V&A records state a primary date of 1877, but nothing supplied by the museum says whether that year marks the design's creation, its first issue or its registration. That distinction cannot be resolved from the evidence used for this page.

For the wider context of the design within the firm's output, the parent guide to Morris wallpaper designs collects the full run of patterns in one place.

Who printed Chrysanthemum and how

The V&A record for O248628 states that Chrysanthemum was printed by Jeffrey & Co. for Morris & Co. That is the clearest statement in the supplied records about who carried out the printing and on whose behalf.

The record for O251142 approaches the firm's role from the other side. It records the specimen as produced by Morris & Co., 449, Oxford Street, London, and given to the museum. The two records are complementary: one names Jeffrey & Co. as the printer working for Morris & Co., the other records Morris & Co. itself, at its Oxford Street address, as the producing firm behind the specimen.

The technique is described by the V&A as a colour woodblock print on paper. The museum also notes a general point about Morris's wallpaper work in this period: his 1870s wallpaper designs required a complex printing technique involving a large number of individual printing blocks, which made them more costly than his earlier, simpler designs.

The place of wallpaper in the firm's priorities shifted over time. According to the V&A, from the early 1880s onwards wallpaper became less central for Morris as his energies focused on textile production at Merton Abbey Mills. A design dated 1877, like Chrysanthemum, belongs to the decade before that shift.

One limit should be stated plainly. The records used here name Jeffrey & Co. as printer and Morris & Co. as producer, but they do not say where the printing took place, whether at Jeffrey & Co.'s own premises or elsewhere. That question remains open on this page.

The surviving specimens and how they reached the museum

The V&A holds three specimens of Chrysanthemum. The O248628 specimen was given by Morris & Co. to the museum and is part of Volume 1, a pattern book containing 25 Morris & Co. patterns from 1862-81 (E.441-529-1919). It is inscribed on the back in ink with title, number and price, though the price itself is not given in the record.

The O251142 specimen comes from a different source. It is part of a wallpaper pattern book containing 132 specimens (E.2734-2866-1980), mounted on a display stand, with a cloth cover. The two pattern books are therefore separate objects in the museum's care, each preserving Chrysanthemum among a larger group of wallpaper specimens.

What we cannot yet establish

Several points often repeated about Chrysanthemum cannot be confirmed from the records used here. They are listed so the page stays honest about its limits, and so that anyone using this page for research knows exactly where the documented evidence stops.

Open questions the supplied evidence does not answer:

• Whether the primary date of 1877 given by the V&A marks the design date, the first issue date or a registration date
• A plant list beyond chrysanthemums and the unspecified flowers and foliage named in the V&A descriptions
• Any documented statement by Morris specifically about Chrysanthemum
• Later reissues of the design
• The price inscribed on the back of the O248628 specimen
• Whether printing took place at Jeffrey & Co.'s premises or at Merton Abbey

Museum holdings outside the V&A are also not documented here. If you want to place Chrysanthemum among Morris's other large flower patterns, the story of Acanthus makes a useful comparison, as does more on Fruit, another design built from garden plants.

Chrysanthemum today

Chrysanthemum survives in studyable form through the three V&A specimens described on this page, preserved in two pattern books that also hold many other Morris & Co. wallpaper designs. That survival in pattern books is why the design can be described so precisely today, from its alternate rows of flowers to the ink inscription recording its title, number and price.

If you enjoy tracing designs this way, from museum record to pattern, the William Morris Original Designs collection brings together designs in the same tradition.