Larkspur by William Morris: The Story of the Wallpaper

Larkspur at a glance

The core record is straightforward. The V&A holds a Larkspur wallpaper under object number O248490, with primary maker William Morris and a primary date of 1874. The same record credits Morris as the designer and gives production dates of 1874 and 1875.

What the pattern shows

The V&A describes its example as a foliate design with flowers, grey on a pale ground. That is the level of description the record supplies: a pattern of foliage and flower forms in a single grey tone against a light background.

It is worth being plain about the limits here. Although the design is named Larkspur, the museum records supplied do not identify the plant depicted or confirm that the flowers represent larkspurs at all. Any closer reading of the botanical forms is observation of the pattern, not a documented identification.

The V&A also records that the example was first issued as a monochrome paper, which fits the grey-on-pale description. A single-colour version of the design was registered as a printed textile in April 1875, according to the V&A.

The dating question: 1872 or 1874

Two V&A sources give different dates, and the evidence does not establish how they relate. The object records for O248490 give a primary date of 1874, with production in 1874 and 1875 and a first issue of 1875. A V&A article on wallpaper design, by contrast, lists Larkspur among designs of 1872, alongside Jasmine (1872), Willow (1874) and Marigold (1875).

The most likely reading, though it goes beyond what the records state, is that one source refers to the design date and the other to the first issue. The evidence supplied does not settle this, so both dates should be treated as documented but unreconciled.

One physical clue survives on the object itself. The V&A notes that its Larkspur example is inscribed on the back in ink with the title, a number and the price, a habit of labelling that helps link the surviving sheet to the firm's working records.

How it was printed

Larkspur was block printed in distemper colours on paper. Distemper is a matte, chalk-bound paint, and block printing means each colour was applied to the paper by a separate carved block, pressed by hand.

The V&A's wallpaper article makes the cost of this clear. It states that 1870s designs such as Larkspur required a complex printing technique involving a large number of individual printing blocks, which made them more expensive than Morris's earlier, simpler designs. Each additional colour and each additional element in the repeat meant another block to cut and another pass on the printing table.

The records supplied do not name the firm that printed Larkspur.

Larkspur in Morris's wallpaper work of the 1870s

Larkspur belongs to the most productive stretch of Morris's wallpaper career. The V&A's wallpaper article states that in the 1870s Morris created many of his most enduring wallpaper designs, naming Larkspur among them. For the full run of patterns across his career, see the complete Morris wallpaper list, and for earlier designs the story of Daisy shows where the sequence began.

According to the V&A, Morris's wallpaper designs centre on plant-based forms and are stylised evocations of natural forms rather than literal transcriptions. Larkspur fits that description as recorded: foliage and flowers, arranged as pattern rather than as a botanical illustration.

Morris's own words about wallpaper are general rather than about Larkspur specifically. In his essay The Lesser Arts (1877), he warned against 'sham-real boughs and flowers' and advised wallpaper designers to avoid making their paper look as if it had been painted by hand. The flat, evenly toned grey of Larkspur's monochrome first issue sits comfortably beside that advice, though the records do not state that Morris designed it with the essay in mind.

The 1870s were also the decade when Morris turned to natural dyeing for textiles. In 1875, according to the V&A, he began working with Thomas Wardle, who owned a dyeing works in Leek, Staffordshire, to re-establish natural dyes. The first textile likely printed by Wardle was Marigold (1875), a pattern Morris also used for wallpaper. The evidence links Wardle to Marigold, not to Larkspur, so no connection between Wardle and the Larkspur textile can be drawn from these records.

The scale of the wallpaper business kept growing after this decade. Larkspur, however, predates all of that.

Where examples survive

The V&A's O248490 example has a documented context. It belongs to Volume 1, a pattern book containing 25 Morris and Company wallpaper patterns from 1862 to 1881, assembled under the museum number E.441-529-1919. Pattern books like this preserve samples in the sequence the firm issued them.

What we cannot yet confirm

Several questions remain open on the current evidence, and it is better to name them than to paper over them.

Open questions on Larkspur:

• No documented statement by Morris about Larkspur specifically exists in the evidence supplied. The only Morris quotations available concern wallpaper generally, from The Lesser Arts (1877).
• The printer of the Larkspur wallpaper is not named in the records supplied. Jeffrey and Co. is documented only for Sunflower and Trellis.
• How the 1872 date in the V&A wallpaper article relates to the 1874 primary date and the 1875 first issue in the object records is not established.
• The plants depicted are not identified in the records, which describe only a foliate design with flowers.
• No later reissues of Larkspur are documented in the evidence supplied.
• Details of the April 1875 registration of the single-colour textile version, beyond the fact of registration, are not supplied, and the evidence does not connect that textile to Wardle.