William Morris's Fruit Wallpaper Explained

Fruit at a glance

The core facts about Fruit come from three separate records at the Victoria and Albert Museum: a printed wallpaper, a design drawing and a printed sample. The V&A gives the wallpaper a primary date of 1865-66 and states it was first issued ca. 1866. The firm behind it was Morris's own, and the printing was carried out by a commercial wallpaper printer in Islington.

One caution belongs up front. The dating of Fruit is not settled: the V&A dates the design drawing to 1862, while the wallpaper record gives 1865-66, and Linda Parry's account, drawing on Mackail's notes, points to a date no earlier than 1865. Those positions are set out in full below.

The design is also known under the name Pomegranate, and the V&A applies both titles to its objects. That double naming matters when searching collections, since records may sit under either word.

What the wallpaper shows

The V&A records the printed example, wallpaper O73421, as showing branches of fruit trees bearing fruit, including limes and pomegranates, set on a blue ground. The fruit is identifiable rather than generic foliage.

The sheet carries a practical record of its own: the V&A notes that it is inscribed on the back in ink with the title, number and price.

According to the V&A, a second printed example, the sample O249428, shows fruit tree branches bearing oranges, lemons and pomegranates on a pale ground. The difference between the two fruit lists is a genuine feature of the records, not a typo, and it is discussed in the section on what cannot be confirmed.

No symbolic meaning for the fruit is stated in any of the supplied records, so none is offered here. What the pattern shows is fruit trees, printed in distemper colours, arranged as a repeating wallpaper design.

The pomegranate in particular recurs across Morris's work, and the V&A design record for Fruit notes that the design borrows motifs from Morris's medieval-style tapestry work. According to the V&A, it shares a historical influence with the Pre-Raphaelite artists and with the art critic John Ruskin.

For a broader look at that motif, see our page on pomegranates in William Morris designs, which gathers the designs where the fruit appears.

The 1862 design drawing

The V&A holds a design for the Fruit wallpaper, museum number O250928, worked in pencil, pen and ink, watercolour and bodycolour on paper. The record gives a production date of 1862 and a place of production in Greater London.

The drawing shows the fruit laid out corner by corner: an olive branch in the bottom left, a branch of unripe lemons opposite, a branch of oranges in the top left and a branch of pomegranates in the top right, all painted in naturalistic colours. This is the most detailed plant list attached to the design in any of the records.

The V&A describes the sheet as a design for Fruit wallpaper by William Morris for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, about 1862. That firm name dates the drawing to the earliest years of the company, which traded under that name before becoming Morris & Co.

The design record also carries an interpretive note: according to the V&A, Fruit borrows motifs from Morris's medieval-style tapestry work and shares a historical influence with the Pre-Raphaelite artists and with John Ruskin. That is the museum's reading, and it is the only sourced interpretation of the design's character in the supplied material.

Who designed Fruit: Morris, Webb and the dating question

Attribution and dating for Fruit do not line up neatly across the records, and it is better to state the disagreements than to smooth them over. The design record O250928 lists William Morris as designer and also Philip Speakman Webb as designer. No other supplied source names Webb in connection with Fruit, so his role cannot be confirmed from the material at hand; it may be a cataloguing point that needs checking against the full V&A documentation.

The dates pull in different directions too. The V&A design record gives a production date of 1862 for the drawing. The wallpaper record O73421 gives a primary date of 1865-66 and a production date of 1866, and states the paper was first issued ca. 1866. Linda Parry, citing Mackail's notes, suggests the design was made no earlier than 1865.

A third thread is the printing order. The V&A sample record states that Fruit was possibly the second paper designed by Morris to be issued, with serial numbering in the printing log placing it between Daisy and Trellis. The museum itself hedges with the word possibly, so this should be read as an indication from the log rather than a settled fact.

The honest summary is this: the wallpaper itself is dated 1865-66 and first issued ca. 1866 by the V&A, the drawing is dated 1862, and the design is attributed to Morris with Webb's involvement recorded only on the design sheet. Anyone citing a single date for Fruit should say which record they are using.

How Fruit was printed

The production story begins with a failure. According to the V&A design record, Morris first tried to print his wallpaper designs at his studio in Red Lion Square in oil colours from etched zinc blocks, and the process did not work.

Production was then subcontracted out to Jeffrey & Co. of Islington, a firm that specialised in the production of hand printing. This arrangement, with Morris's firm designing and publishing and Jeffrey's printing, lies behind the early wallpapers documented here.

The later sample O249428 confirms the division of labour in its own record: the V&A states it was published by Morris & Co. and printed by Jeffrey & Co. It is a colour woodblock print on paper, dated ca. 1868-70, place London.

The V&A records the finished wallpaper O73421 as block printed in distemper colours on paper. The move from the failed zinc block experiments to hand block printing by a specialist firm was what made the early papers viable.

Fruit in Morris's early wallpaper business

Fruit belongs to the first wave of the firm's wallpapers. In the early 1860s the British wallpaper market was booming, and Morris made wallpaper one of the first things his new interior decorations company put into serial production. A design issued ca. 1866, as the V&A records for Fruit, sits right at the start of that output.

Morris's own attitude to the medium was qualified. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's account, Morris described wallpaper as a makeshift decoration, treating it as only a tolerable substitute for more luxurious wall coverings. He designed wallpapers anyway, and in quantity, because they were what most customers could afford and use.

The surviving examples of Fruit reach us through the firm's pattern books. The wallpaper O73421 is part of Volume 1, a pattern book containing 25 Morris & Co. patterns from 1862-81. The sample O249428 belongs to a second book holding 23 Morris & Co. patterns, and it too is inscribed on the back in ink with title and number.

Wallpaper stayed central to the firm through the 1860s and 1870s. From the early 1880s onwards it became less of a central concern for Morris as his energies focused on the production of textiles at Merton Abbey Mills, but by then designs like Fruit had already established the firm's reputation in the medium.

The full run of the firm's papers is set out in our complete list of Morris wallpaper designs, which places Fruit among its contemporaries.

Fruit among the early wallpapers

Volume 1, the pattern book that preserves the printed Fruit, gathers 25 Morris & Co. patterns from 1862-81, so Fruit sits in company with the designs that defined the firm's early style. The early papers share a approach: identifiable plants, naturalistic branches and a flat repeating structure suited to block printing.

If the printing log's hint is right, Fruit was issued between Daisy and Trellis, which makes Trellis in detail a natural comparison. Trellis is another early paper built on recognisable natural motifs, and reading the two together shows how the firm's first designs balanced observation against repeat.

Other early designs have their own pages on this site, including Acanthus and a closer look at Willow Bough, for readers who want to trace how the wallpaper style developed after the first issues.

Pomegranates and the fruit motif

The pomegranate is the one fruit that appears in all three V&A records for this design: on the blue-ground wallpaper, on the pale-ground sample and in the top right corner of the 1862 drawing. It anchors the pattern across its versions.

The fruit motif in Fruit connects to the firm's wider use of edible and flowering plants, and the V&A's note that the design borrows from Morris's medieval-style tapestry work places it in the same current as the Pre-Raphaelites and Ruskin. The motif's recurrence across Morris's output is treated in full on our page about pomegranates in his designs.

What the records do not give is any statement by Morris about the meaning of the fruit, so the motif is best read here as subject matter rather than symbol.

Where to see Fruit today

Three objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum document Fruit, each with its own museum number, date and medium. Together they cover the design drawing, the printed wallpaper and a later printed sample, which is unusually complete coverage for a single pattern.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's holding of Fruit is not established from the material consulted for this page, so no Met object number is given here. Readers should search the Met's own collection database directly for the current position.

What we cannot yet confirm

Several details often assumed about Fruit are not established by the records consulted here, and it is worth listing them so readers know where the evidence stops.

The following points remain unconfirmed:

• No documented statement by Morris specifically about Fruit has been found. Morris did describe wallpaper in general as a 'makeshift' decoration, only a tolerable substitute for richer wall coverings, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• Philip Webb's role rests on the single V&A design record O250928, which lists him alongside Morris. No other supplied source names Webb for Fruit, so his involvement is unconfirmed.
• The three V&A records give different fruit lists: limes and pomegranates on the wallpaper, oranges, lemons and pomegranates on the sample, and olive, unripe lemons, oranges and pomegranates on the drawing. Which fruits appeared in every issue cannot be settled from these records alone.
• Later reissues cannot be documented in detail beyond the fact that the design remains available from the Morris & Co. division of Sanderson. No dates or colourway histories for reissues are established here.
• The claim that Fruit was possibly the second paper issued comes from serial numbering in the printing log, and the V&A itself hedges it. It should not be repeated as certain.
• The full printing history at Jeffrey & Co., including dates of printing runs for Fruit, is not documented in the supplied material.

Where a detail above matters to your own research, the V&A object records are the place to start, since they carry the museum numbers and can be requested directly.