William Morris's Eyebright Chintz: History and Design

What Eyebright looks like

Eyebright is a small-scale pattern of tiny flowers. The V&A describes the fabric as printed with a repeating pattern of small eyebright flowers and buttercups, and a Morris & Co label is attached to one of the museum's examples.

The three V&A examples differ in colour. One is described with the flowers in white and shades of blue, another in yellow, white and shades of blue. The records consulted do not date these colourways individually.

Quick facts: date, designer, maker, technique

The V&A record for the first example, object number O270945, lists a block-printed cotton with primary date 1883 and, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum, attributes the design to William Morris, made for Morris & Co. The same record gives a production date range of 1883 to 1912, which shows the fabric remained in production for some years after its first appearance.

The three V&A examples

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds three examples of Eyebright. Two of them carry the firm's stamp, reading 'Morris & Company 449 Oxford Street', which ties the surviving pieces to the company's shop address. The third carries an attached Morris & Co label instead.

The production ranges matter. Both dated ranges run well past 1883, to 1912 and 1919 respectively, so the pattern was printed over decades rather than in a single campaign. The records do not say how continuously.

The Met example and later printing

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a cotton furnishing fabric titled Eyebright, credited to William Morris as designer. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's record, the design was registered in 1883 and the museum's example was printed between 1917 and 1923.

This is the clearest documented later printing of the design. It shows that Eyebright was still being produced more than thirty years after registration, consistent with the long V&A production ranges. The Met record consulted does not include the object number or dimensions, so those details are not given here.

What the records do not tell us

Honest gaps remain. No record consulted names the printer or the printing site for Eyebright, so it cannot be stated here whether the fabric was printed at Merton Abbey or by an outside printer. The attribution to Morris rests on the museum records themselves; no other scholarly source was supplied for this page.

Open questions:

• Which event the 1883 date denotes: design, registration or first issue. The Met record says the design was registered in 1883, but no source states what the V&A's primary date marks.
• The printer and printing site for this design.
• The full colourway history. The V&A records describe three colour schemes but do not date them individually.
• Any documented statement by Morris himself about Eyebright. None appears in the records consulted.
• Later reissues beyond the Met's 1917 to 1923 printing and the V&A production ranges.

Where a claim above rests on a single institution's record, it is attributed in the text. Readers should treat the printer, the site of printing and the meaning of the 1883 date as undocumented rather than settled.

Eyebright among Morris's printed chintzes

Eyebright belongs to the group of small-scale floral printed cottons often called Morris chintzes. For the wider picture, see the full list of Morris printed textiles, which places it alongside the other furnishing fabrics of the period.

Several designs make useful comparisons. Snakeshead in detail covers a bolder printed cotton with a fuller documented history, while a closer look at Honeysuckle examines an earlier textile. Brother Rabbit shows a different strand of the same printing tradition, with animals worked into the field.