Pimpernel by William Morris: The Story of the Wallpaper

Pimpernel at a glance

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a wallpaper titled Pimpernel under museum number O248605, with William Morris listed as primary maker, a primary date of 1876 and England as the place of production. According to the V&A record, the design was registered in 1876 and printed by Jeffery & Co. for Morris & Co.

The essentials, drawn from the V&A object records:

• Designer: William Morris, according to the V&A record.
• Date: the design was registered in 1876, according to the V&A record.
• Printer: Jeffery & Co., working for Morris & Co., according to the V&A record.
• Medium: wallpaper, made in England.
• Documented use: hung in the dining room at Kelmscott House, Morris's London home, according to the V&A object history.

Note one distinction the records force on us. According to the V&A, the design was registered in 1876, not issued in that year as a stated first sale. Registration and first sale were not necessarily the same event, and the evidence here does not say when Pimpernel first went on sale.

Attribution and the printer's name

On the question of who designed Pimpernel, the V&A record for the sheet O248605 names William Morris as the designer. That is the attribution this page follows, because it is the only attribution supplied by the evidence. No scholarly source beyond this museum record is available here, so no second opinion can be quoted.

There is a small wrinkle in the records over the printer's name. The Pimpernel record reads Jeffery & Co., while the V&A record for Sunflower gives Jeffrey & Co. Where a fact comes from a single record, this page keeps the spelling of that record.

Jeffery & Co. appears repeatedly in the V&A records for Morris wallpapers of the 1860s and 1870s. The museum lists the firm as printer for Trellis (1862) and Larkspur (1874) as well as Sunflower (1879), so Pimpernel sits in familiar company.

Where the surviving sheets come from

The V&A holds three separate records for Pimpernel wallpaper. All are associated with William Morris as primary maker, and the two additional records, O248596 and O248603, carry a production date of 1876, matching the registration date on the first sheet.

The sheet numbered O248605 has a history worth tracing. According to the V&A, it belongs to a pattern book called Volume 1, a pattern book containing 25 Morris & Co. patterns from 1862 to 1881, catalogued under the group number E.441-529-1919. The same sheet is inscribed on the back in ink with its title, number and price.

The V&A does not state in the evidence supplied how these sheets entered the museum's collection, so no route of acquisition can be given here. What the records do establish is the paper trail: three examples, one firm date, and one sheet that sat in a company pattern book covering two decades of production.

A paper from Morris's own dining room

The most personal fact in the Pimpernel record concerns where the paper hung. According to the V&A object history, the Pimpernel pattern was used in the dining room at Kelmscott House, the London home of William Morris.

A wallpaper recorded as hanging in the house where Morris himself lived is unusual evidence for any design. The V&A record does not say when the paper was hung at Kelmscott House or who chose it, so those questions stay open.

Morris family connections also shaped what survives in museum collections. On her death in 1938, May Morris bequeathed to the V&A a sizeable collection of her father's work, including 30 designs for wallpaper, textiles and embroidery, along with working drawings. The evidence does not state that the Pimpernel sheets came through this bequest, so no such claim is made here, but the bequest explains in general terms how deep the V&A's holdings of Morris wallpaper material run.

Pimpernel's place in Morris's wallpaper work

Pimpernel arrived in the middle of Morris's wallpaper career, not at its start. According to the V&A, the first paper Morris designed was Trellis in 1862, suggested by the rose trellis in the garden of Red House, his home in Kent. Daisy followed in 1864 and Fruit in 1865. Pimpernel's registration in 1876, as recorded by the V&A, came more than a decade after Fruit.

Morris held modest views about wallpaper as a medium. The V&A records that he described wallpaper as a makeshift, treating it as only a tolerable substitute for finer wall coverings. For anyone studying Pimpernel, that attitude is useful context: Morris invested serious design effort in a material he ranked second to textiles.

The pattern also predates the busiest later phase of the firm's wallpaper business. Between 1882 and Morris's death in 1896, Morris & Company issued a further 35 new wallpaper designs in a variety of types and prices. Pimpernel belongs to the generation of papers before that late wave.

After the early 1880s, wallpaper became less central to Morris as his energies shifted to textile production at Merton Abbey Mills. According to the V&A, that consolidation of production came in 1881, when tapestry weaving was established at the site and John Henry Dearle was appointed to manage production.

How the V&A characterises the style

The V&A cites Pimpernel as an example of Morris's wallpaper designs expressed in a luxuriantly naturalistic style, naming Acanthus alongside it. That is the extent of the museum's characterisation in the evidence available, and it is a description of style rather than a plant-by-plant reading of the pattern.

A limitation should be stated clearly. The evidence does not identify which plants or motifs appear in the Pimpernel pattern itself.

Two Morris statements about wallpaper design generally are recorded by the V&A and are worth having in mind, with the caution that neither is a comment on Pimpernel specifically. In his essay The Lesser Arts (1877), Morris warned against the likes of sham-real boughs and flowers.

Both statements set out the principle that a wallpaper should declare itself a flat, repeating surface. Read as context, they help explain why a museum would describe Pimpernel's style as luxuriantly naturalistic within the terms of pattern design, rather than as imitation of nature.

What we cannot yet establish

An honest profile of Pimpernel has to leave several questions open. The gaps listed below are absent from the evidence, not settled by silence elsewhere.

Questions the available records do not answer:

• First issue date: according to the V&A, the design was registered in 1876, but no separate date for the pattern's first issue or sale appears in the evidence.
• Scholarly attribution: only the V&A attribution to William Morris is supplied. No additional named scholarly source is available to confirm or extend it.
• Motifs: no supplied record identifies the specific plants or flowers shown in the Pimpernel pattern.
• Printing technique: according to the V&A record, Jeffery & Co. printed the paper for Morris & Co., but the records give no technical details of how it was produced.
• Later reissues: no reissues of Pimpernel are documented in the evidence.
• Other collections: only the three V&A records are supplied. No second institution holding an example is documented here.
• Morris on Pimpernel: no documented statement by Morris about Pimpernel itself exists in the evidence. The quotations above are general comments on wallpaper design.

Where a page like this one leaves a gap, the reason is almost always that no source in reach states the fact. Pimpernel is well documented on the points that matter most to a buyer or researcher, the designer, the date and the surviving examples, and thinner on the technical and botanical questions that specialist literature would need to settle.