Honeysuckle by William Morris: The 1876 Printed Textile

Honeysuckle at a glance

The core facts about the 1876 Honeysuckle come from two institutions. The V&A dates its furnishing fabric examples to 1876 and credits the design to William Morris for Morris & Co. The Metropolitan Museum of Art independently records Honeysuckle textiles designed by Morris with the design registered in 1876.

The documented points, each traceable to a museum record:

• Designer: William Morris, for Morris & Co., per the V&A records for O270999 and O270997.
• Date: 1876 as the V&A primary date; the Met records the design as registered 1876, with printing dated 1876-77 for its linen example.
• Medium: block printed linen, according to the V&A record for O270999.
• Maker: the V&A's textiles page records the Honeysuckle furnishing fabric as made by Wardle & Co. in England.
• The V&A specimen O270999 carries a Morris & Co. label and is inscribed on the back in ink with title, number and price, details that anchor the object to the firm's own records.

One caution belongs in any quick summary. The V&A notes that a different design with the title Honeysuckle is for a chintz, and its wallpaper specimen O248679 of 1883 is credited to Mary (May) Morris. Anyone researching the title needs to separate these records before quoting a date or a designer.

The 1876 furnishing fabric in museum records

The V&A holds two furnishing fabrics titled Honeysuckle, both dated 1876 and credited to William Morris. The first, object number O270999, is block printed linen and, according to the V&A's record, is printed with the Honeysuckle pattern in shades of blue on a white ground, with a Morris & Co. label attached. The second, O270997, is printed in white, purple, pale green, and shades of blue and red.

According to the Met's records, one is linen with the design registered in 1876 and printed 1876-77; the other is cotton, also with the design registered in 1876, printed 1877-1917. The Met's records checked here do not give reference numbers for these objects, so they cannot be cited by object number.

That makes Wardle the only maker named for this design in the sources checked, and it matters for the printing history discussed below.

How the fabric was made

The technique documented for the V&A's O270999 is block printing on linen. For the second V&A fabric, the record describes the printed colouring but the excerpts checked do not state a separate printing method beyond its classification as a furnishing fabric.

The wider context comes from the V&A's account of Morris's working life. In the early 1870s, the museum records, Morris accepted that his gift was not for figurative form but for repeat patterns, and he threw himself into mastering the technical processes required to make his own products. The 1876 Honeysuckle falls squarely in that period of technical experiment.

The Wardle connection is the clearest documented thread. According to the V&A, in 1875 Morris began working with Thomas Wardle, owner of a dyeing works in Leek, Staffordshire, who was keen to re-establish the use of natural dyes. The first textile likely to have been printed by Wardle, the museum notes, was Marigold in 1875, a dense pattern Morris also used for wallpaper. Honeysuckle followed the next year, and the V&A's textiles records name Wardle & Co. as maker.

What the records do not name is the printer of this specific design. It is also not established from these records whether Honeysuckle was ever produced at Merton Abbey, since the V&A dates the consolidation of company production there to 1881 without linking it to this design.

For readers who want the fuller story of Morris's printed cottons and the dyeing campaign behind them, the story of Honeysuckle sits within a wider shift in his working methods during the 1870s.

Two designs, one title: sorting out the attribution

The title Honeysuckle attaches to two different Morris firm designs, and the museum records keep them distinct. The 1883 wallpaper specimen is another matter entirely.

The V&A holds a wallpaper specimen titled Honeysuckle, object number O248679, and credits it to Mary (May) Morris as designer with a primary date of 1883, made in England. According to the V&A's record, it is a colour woodblock print on paper showing intertwined honeysuckle flowers and foliage, and it is inscribed on the back in ink with title, number and price. The museum also notes that a different design with the title Honeysuckle is for a chintz, which is how the two designs are kept apart in its own documentation.

The practical consequence for research is simple. A date of 1876 belongs with William Morris's printed fabric; a date of 1883 belongs with May Morris's wallpaper. Mixing the two records produces the common error of dating the wallpaper to the 1870s or crediting the fabric to May. The V&A's specimen O248679 also sits in 'Volume 2', a pattern book containing 27 Morris & Co. patterns from 1862-81 that was given by Morris & Co., which shows how the firm itself archived its papers.

Confusion between similarly titled designs is not unique to this case, and it is one reason object numbers matter more than design names when checking a claim. The same discipline applies to other Morris patterns with long afterlives, such as Brother Rabbit in detail, where the printed cotton and later uses need to be separated too.

What the pattern shows

For the 1876 fabric, the secure visual evidence is the colouring. The V&A describes O270999 as printed with the Honeysuckle pattern in shades of blue on a white ground, and O270997 as printed in white, purple, pale green, and shades of blue and red. Those colour descriptions are the most concrete visual information the records checked provide for the printed textile.

Secure plant identification is a different question. The detailed description of intertwined honeysuckle flowers and foliage in the records checked belongs to the 1883 wallpaper specimen O248679, which the V&A credits to May Morris, not to the 1876 fabric. For the printed textile, the records checked do not itemise which plants or motifs the design contains, so any plant-by-plant reading of the 1876 chintz would go beyond the documented evidence.

That is the museum's characterisation of his approach, and it is as far as an evidence-based description of the 1876 pattern's style can responsibly go without a detailed published study of the design itself.

Open questions the records do not settle

Several details about Honeysuckle are often assumed but are not established by the museum records checked for this page. Listing them openly is more useful than filling the gaps with guesswork.

What remains genuinely unknown:

• The printer of the 1876 fabric.
• The exact registration date. The Metropolitan Museum of Art gives only 'design registered 1876' for its Honeysuckle textiles; no day or month appears in the records checked.
• Object numbers for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's examples.
• Whether Honeysuckle was produced at Merton Abbey. The V&A dates the consolidation of production there to 1881 but does not link the works to this design.
• Any documented statement by William Morris about Honeysuckle. The Morris quotations found in the sources checked concern wallpaper design generally, including his advice in The Lesser Arts (1877), and none mentions this design by name.
• Named later reissues.

None of these gaps undermines the core attribution. Two institutions independently date the design to 1876 and credit it to William Morris, and the V&A's labelled, inscribed specimen gives the firm's own title and price. The gaps concern the finer production history, not the design's identity.

Honeysuckle among Morris's printed textiles

Honeysuckle belongs to the group of Morris printed textiles, often called chintzes, that can be dated and sourced from museum records. The Morris chintz list gathers those designs in one place, with dates and makers checked against institutional records, and it is the quickest way to see where the 1876 fabric sits in the sequence.

Other designs from the same printed-textile tradition have their own research pages here. a closer look at Snakeshead covers a printed cotton from the same circle of dense floral patterns, our guide to Strawberry Thief follows the best known of the later chintzes, and Brother Rabbit in detail traces another design whose title has been reused and reinterpreted. Each page applies the same method used here: museum records first, gaps stated rather than filled.

For the other design that shares this title, May Morris's Honeysuckle Wallpaper covers the 1883 Honeysuckle wallpaper specimen that the V&A credits to May Morris, including the V&A specimen O248679 and what its record establishes. Reading the two pages side by side makes the distinction between the designs concrete.