Powdered Wallpaper by William Morris: History and Design

What the pattern shows: flowering plants on a small-leaf ground

The V&A describes Powdered as a brick pattern of flowering plants with an underlay of small leaf foliage. In a brick pattern, the main motifs sit in staggered rows, so each row of flowers falls halfway between the rows above and below it. According to the V&A's object descriptions, one of the recorded specimens sets the pattern on a pale ground.

That description is an observation drawn from the Victoria and Albert Museum's own object records rather than an interpretation of meaning. It tells us the scale and arrangement of the design: small flowering stems scattered evenly across the surface, with a quieter layer of leafy growth filling the spaces between them.

A date of 1874, with an attribution to Morris

The V&A gives a production date of 1874 for the Powdered specimens and records them as made in England. The museum also lists William Morris as the designer of the wallpaper.

One caution for researchers: the V&A records used here give a production date only. They do not separate a design date from a first issue or registration date, so neither can be stated with confidence. The 1874 date should be read as the museum's dating of the specimens' production, not as a documented day the pattern was first issued.

How the specimens were made and printed

The V&A records different techniques for the different specimens. For the specimen numbered O248536, the materials and techniques are given simply as print on paper. For the two specimens numbered O251078 and O251072, the record reads colour woodblock, or machine, print on paper, so the museum's own entry hedges between hand block printing and machine printing.

For those two specimens, the V&A records that the wallpaper was published by Morris and Co. and produced by Morris and Co., 449, Oxford Street, London. The specimens came to the museum as a gift from Shand Kydd Ltd.

The pattern book that contains them carries a firm statement about method. It is inscribed:

The accompanying text explains that hand-printed papers are produced slowly, each block being dipped into pigment and pressed onto the paper for each separate colour. The inscription describes the firm's practice for its hand-printed papers, but the V&A record for Powdered itself still leaves open whether these particular specimens were block printed or machine printed.

The pattern books behind the survivors

The three known specimens of Powdered reach us through two pattern books. That specimen is inscribed on the back in ink with its title, number and price, although the records used here do not state what the price was or who made the inscription.

The O251078 and O251072 specimens sit in a different source: a wallpaper pattern book containing 132 specimens, mounted on a display stand with a cloth cover, recorded under numbers E.2734-2866-1980. The records used here do not say who designed or printed that book.

What we cannot yet say about Powdered

For researchers, it is as useful to know the gaps as the facts. The following points are not established by the records used for this page.

• No printer or manufacturer, such as Jeffrey and Co., is named in the records used here.
• No specific plants are securely identified in the pattern. The description stops at flowering plants and small leaf foliage, as recorded by the V&A.
• No later reissues of Powdered are documented in the evidence available.
• No documented statement by Morris about Powdered is known. The hand-printing inscription in the pattern book is not attributed to Morris personally.
• The attribution to William Morris rests on the V&A's record alone in the evidence used here; no second named source is available to corroborate it.

Where Powdered sits in Morris's wallpaper work

Powdered belongs to the group of Morris wallpapers built on a small, evenly scattered motif rather than a large repeating stem. That places it in contrast with designs such as Acanthus, where the foliage itself fills the sheet at a much larger scale, as described in a closer look at Acanthus.

The powdered layout, with its staggered rows and quiet underlay of leaves, was one of several structural approaches Morris used across his wallpapers. our guide to Willow Bough looks at another pattern built on a repeating plant motif, and our guide to Compton covers a later design with a different rhythm again.

To see how these patterns relate across the whole output of the firm, the Morris wallpaper list gathers the designs in one place.