Jasmine Wallpaper by William Morris: History and Design

What the Jasmine pattern looks like

The V&A describes Jasmine as an all-over pattern of hawthorn leaves, blossoms and branches laid on a disguised vertical meander. The meander gives the design its underlying structure: the eye follows a rising line through the foliage, but the framework stays quiet enough that the pattern reads as a field of flowering branches rather than a grid.

The surviving V&A example carries its own documentary evidence. On the back, the sheet is inscribed in ink with its title, number and price, a practical record of how the firm managed its stock.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's example is a sheet block printed in distemper colours, measuring 21 7/16 x 22 1/2 in. Distemper printing, with pigment bound in size, was the standard method for Morris & Co. wallpapers of this period, and the Met's record confirms it for this design.

When Jasmine was designed and issued

The V&A dates both of its Jasmine wallpaper examples to 1872 and gives William Morris as designer, made in England. According to the V&A's record, the wallpaper was first issued in 1872, so the production date and the first issue fall in the same year on the museum's account.

One caution on dates: the records used here give no separate design date and no registration date for Jasmine. The 1872 date is the V&A's production and first-issue dating, and nothing in the evidence supplied distinguishes an earlier moment of design from the year the pattern reached the market.

Jasmine belongs to the early-middle run of Morris's flower wallpapers, the period that also produced Daisy, Fruit and Pimpernel. The full run is set out in the complete list of Morris wallpaper designs, where Jasmine sits among the patterns of the 1870s.

A pattern that was hard to print

Not every Morris pattern ran smoothly through the works, and Jasmine left traces of trouble. Parry notes that the many deletions and substitutions in the printing record indicate initial difficulties with the Jasmine pattern, and that attempts made in 1874 to print it in wash colours seem to have been unsuccessful.

That observation, drawn from the firm's own printing records, is the closest thing in the evidence used here to a contemporary account of how Jasmine fared in production. It suggests a design whose colour structure resisted at least one printing approach, though the records do not say how the difficulty was finally resolved.

Jasmine Trellis: the earlier textile of the same name

The name Jasmine also belongs to an earlier printed cotton, and the two should not be confused. The V&A holds a furnishing fabric titled Jasmine Trellis, museum number O266147, described as hand block-printed cotton, with curling floral branches entwining a wooden trellis. The V&A gives William Morris as designer and dates the fabric 1868 to 1870, made in Great Britain.

The V&A's fuller record describes Jasmine Trellis as a furnishing fabric designed by Morris, made by Thomas Wardle and manufactured by Bannister Hall. The museum's object history goes further: it calls Jasmine Trellis Morris's earliest design for textiles.

The context matters. The V&A records that the first printed fabrics made by Morris's company, in 1868, were copies of 1830s white-ground chintzes, produced at Clarkson in Lancashire using blocks rather than the modern roller method. Those Clarkson prints were, in the museum's account, effectively a test for Morris's first actual textile design, Jasmine Trellis, a pattern simplified to suit the palette of the mostly chemical dyes Clarkson used.

The V&A also records that Morris was happier with his second textile design, Tulip and Willow of 1873, though he was disappointed by the crude effect achieved with Prussian blue dye. Read against that, Jasmine Trellis stands at the very start of the firm's textile work, constrained by the dyes available to its first printer.

So there are two Jasmines: a printed cotton of about 1868 to 1870 with a trellis structure, made with Wardle and Bannister Hall, and a wallpaper of 1872 showing hawthorn on a meander. The records used here do not state a printer or manufacturer for the wallpaper, and the Wardle and Bannister Hall names attach only to the fabric.

Original Morris designs from across the firm's output, wallpapers and printed textiles alike, are gathered in the William Morris Original Designs collection.

Where examples survive

Four records anchor the design. Two are V&A wallpaper examples, one of which sits inside a bound pattern book that preserves the firm's own numbering and pricing. The other two are the printed cotton and the Met's distemper sheet.

The Met's accession number is not supplied in the records used here, so readers citing that sheet should rely on the museum's own record for the full reference.

What the records do not tell us

Several facts often attached to Morris wallpapers cannot be confirmed for Jasmine from the records used here. It is worth being precise about the gaps, because details that belong to other designs are easy to import by mistake.

The following points are not established by the evidence used for this page:

• No source in the records used here states that Jeffrey & Co. printed the Jasmine wallpaper. That printer is documented for other Morris designs, not this one.
• No connection between Jasmine and Merton Abbey appears in the records used here. Merton Abbey is documented for the firm's later textile and tapestry production, not for this 1872 wallpaper.
• No documented statement by William Morris about Jasmine appears in the evidence used here.
• No verified later reissues of Jasmine are recorded in the evidence used here.
• No registration date for the wallpaper design is given, and the records do not separate a design date from the 1872 production and first-issue dating.
• Beyond the V&A's description of hawthorn leaves, blossoms and branches on a disguised vertical meander, no further plant identifications are securely sourced in the records used here.

If you find a source giving a printer, a registration date or a reissue for Jasmine, it should be checked against the museum records above before the detail is repeated.

Jasmine among Morris's wallpapers

Jasmine belongs to Morris's line of flower wallpapers, the family of designs that also includes Daisy, Fruit and Pimpernel. Each of those pages follows the same method used here: museum records first, pattern description second, and a clear line between what is documented and what is not.

What the records do establish is Jasmine's place in sequence. The printed cotton Jasmine Trellis was, on the V&A's account, Morris's earliest textile design, tested through the 1868 Clarkson prints. The 1872 wallpaper carried the plant-based, all-over approach into the firm's paper hangings, in the same years as the flower patterns linked above.