Ispahan by William Morris: The Woven Textile Explained

A woven wool furnishing fabric: what Ispahan is

Ispahan is a furnishing fabric woven in wool, credited in the Victoria and Albert Museum's records to William Morris as designer and made for Morris & Co. The museum holds three examples, each a different colourway, and describes one of them as woven in light blue, dark green and salmon.

The V&A records the fabric as made in Great Britain. Beyond that, the records say the design was made for Morris & Co. rather than naming a workshop or weaving site, so the place of manufacture is known only at the level of country.

For readers comparing Morris's woven fabrics, Ispahan sits in the same family of wool furnishing textiles covered in our Morris woven work list.

Date and attribution: what the museum records say

The Victoria and Albert Museum dates its three Ispahan examples to around 1888. For two of them, museum numbers O271031 and O271032, the museum also records a wider production span of about 1888 to 1919, which suggests the design stayed in production or in the firm's stock well after its introduction.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art agrees on the designer and the date: according to the Met's record, its Ispahan, accession number 1992.88, credits William Morris as designer and gives the date as designed ca. 1888.

Two limits should be stated plainly. First, no source in the material used here gives a first issue or registration date for Ispahan distinct from the design date of ca. 1888. Second, the attribution to Morris rests on the V&A and Met catalogue records alone; no independent published scholarly source is present in the evidence used for this page, so the attribution cannot be checked against a second account.

Surviving examples in museum collections

Four examples are documented here: three in the V&A and one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The table lists each with its object or accession number and what the records say about it.

The Met's example is a large piece. According to the Met's record, it measures 208.9 by 243.5 cm including fringe (82 1/4 by 95 7/8 inches), and the museum classifies it as Textiles-Woven. Because it is marked public domain under Open Access, the museum's photography of it can be studied and reproduced freely.

What the sources do not tell us

For a design with four museum examples, the documentary record is thin. Researchers should be aware of the following gaps, none of which can be filled from the sources used here.

Points the available records leave open:

• No manufacturer, printer or weaving site is named. The V&A records say only that the fabric was designed for Morris & Co. and, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum, made in Great Britain.
• No production technique is described beyond the medium: woven wool. The records do not specify the weave structure or the loom used.
• No plants or motifs in the pattern are securely identified in the sources used here. The records describe colourways only, so any reading of the pattern's flowers would be observation, not documented identification.
• No documented statement by William Morris about Ispahan is known from the material used for this page.
• No later reissues of Ispahan are recorded in the sources used here, beyond the V&A's production span of ca. 1888 to 1919 for two examples.

Ispahan among Morris's woven textiles

Ispahan belongs to the group of woven wool furnishing fabrics produced by Morris & Co. in the firm's later decades, a body of work set out in our reference list of Morris woven textiles, tapestries and carpets. Reading it alongside other woven designs is the most reliable way to see what is distinctive in its colouring and scale.

Two related profiles are useful for comparison: Peacock and Dragon in detail, another woven wool furnishing fabric, and our guide to Bird, which shows how the firm handled figure motifs in a woven structure. For a design built from flower forms, more on Flower Garden offers a useful contrast in how floral material is treated in wool.