The Forest Tapestry by William Morris

The Forest at a glance

One point needs care. The V&A record supplies a production date of 1887 but no separate design date, so no distinction between when The Forest was drawn and when it was first woven can be made here.

The V&A's William Morris textiles page records The Forest as a tapestry designed by William Morris, Philip Webb and John Henry Dearle, made by the Merton Abbey workshop in 1887 in England. That single record underpins most of what follows. For how this tapestry sits alongside Morris and Co.'s other woven work, see our [Morris woven work list](L1).

What the tapestry shows

The Forest depicts birds, animals and flowers set within a dense cover of trailing acanthus leaves. An embroidered inscription runs across the design. This is a description of what the tapestry shows, not a reading of what it might mean.

The verse inscribed on the tapestry was later published under the title 'The Lion' in Morris's Poems By the Way. The poem therefore survives in print as well as in thread, which makes the inscription one of the more traceable features of the design.

The acanthus cover itself has a family resemblance within Morris's woven work. The V&A notes that The Forest uses a dense cover of trailing acanthus leaves as seen in Morris's first tapestry, Acanthus and Vine. The connection is one of pattern, and the museum states it directly.

Three hands on one design

According to the V&A, The Forest was designed by William Morris, Philip Webb and John Henry Dearle. The tapestry is therefore a collaboration rather than the work of a single hand, and the record is specific about how the work was shared.

The V&A states that the design incorporates five studies of animals and birds by Philip Webb. Webb's contribution is thus the most clearly defined part of the collaboration: the creatures that give the tapestry its name and its points of interest.

Dearle's part is less certain. The V&A records that it is possible that Henry Dearle supplied foreground floral details for The Forest, although these are similar to Webb's preparatory drawings. In other words, the museum itself holds the attribution open, and this page does likewise rather than settling the question either way.

Woven at Merton Abbey

The Forest is a tapestry woven in wool and silk on a cotton warp. The combination gives the design its working materials: two lustrous weft yarns building the image over a strong cotton foundation.

According to the V&A, the tapestry was woven at Merton Abbey by William Knight, John Martin and William Sleath. Naming the weavers matters. Tapestry at Morris and Co. was a collective craft, and the hands at the loom shaped the final object as much as the drawings did.

One caution on the written record. The evidence excerpt describing the weavers as working under superintendence is truncated, so the full statement cannot be quoted here. The names of the three weavers stand; the fuller sentence about their superintendence does not.

Where the record is thin

Several questions that readers of a design history naturally ask cannot be answered from the evidence supplied. It is better to list them than to paper over them.

The following points remain unestablished:

• No separate design date is documented. The V&A record gives 1887 as the production date only.
• No documented statement by Morris himself about The Forest appears in the evidence.
• No later reissues of The Forest are documented in the evidence.
• Only one museum record is supplied, the V&A example under O89213. A second institutional holding cannot be listed.
• The hand behind the embroidered inscription is not established by the evidence.
• No commission or first-owner information appears in the evidence.

These gaps are not unusual for nineteenth century workshop production. They simply mark the boundary of what the museum record supplied here can support, and they are stated plainly so that readers know what rests on documentation and what does not. Related woven commissions are covered in our [Morris woven work list](L1).

The Forest in Morris and Co. tapestry

The V&A describes The Forest as one of Morris's most successful compositions. That judgement comes from the museum's own record of the tapestry, and it is the only evaluative claim made on this page.

The V&A also states that Morris's use of birds and animals in his early tapestries is a forebear to his later carpet patterns. Read that way, The Forest sits at a point where the animal imagery of the early woven work feeds forward into the flat, repeating world of the carpets.

The acanthus cover ties the design back to Acanthus and Vine, Morris's first tapestry, as the V&A notes. For the wider context of the workshop's output, see our Morris woven work list, which gathers the tapestries, woven textiles and carpets in one reference page.

Seeing The Forest today

The documented holding is the Victoria and Albert Museum example, object number O89213. That is the record this page rests on, and it is the place to look for the tapestry itself.

The evidence supplies no other museum records for The Forest, so no further locations can be given. If you want to see the design's language of leaves, birds and beasts in another form, our William Morris Original Designs collection gathers the studio's drawn work alongside prints made from it.