William Morris's St James's Wallpaper Explained

A wallpaper made for a palace staircase

St James's was designed for the Grand Staircase in St James's Palace, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum's record for the design. That places it inside one of the firm's most significant early jobs.

The V&A traces the connection back further. The decorative scheme for St James's Palace was begun in 1866 and was Morris & Co.'s first secular commission. Within a few years of the 1862 International Exhibition, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. had secured the commission to decorate two rooms at the palace.

Date and attribution: what the records say

The V&A dates the St James's wallpaper to 1881 and credits William Morris as its designer. Both points come from the museum's records and are the only sources for them on this page, so they should be read as the V&A's position rather than a settled consensus.

How St James's was printed

The wallpaper was block printed in distemper colours on paper, and the V&A records that it was printed by Jeffrey & Co. for Morris & Co.

The pattern demanded a great deal of the block printer. According to the V&A's object record, the design requires two widths of paper to complete the pattern horizontally, has a vertical repeat of 119.4 cm requiring two blocks per colour, and needs 68 blocks in total.

The V&A's wallpaper page repeats the block count from a different angle: it states that the design required 68 separate printing blocks to create a repeat over two wallpaper widths and had a vertical repeat of 127cm. The two repeat measurements, 119.4 cm and 127 cm, do not match; both are given by the V&A and this page does not resolve the difference.

What the pattern shows

The V&A's specimen O248672 shows intertwined foliage and flowers on a pale-blue ground. That is as far as secure description goes: no plant species or named motifs are identified in the records available for this page, so the plants cannot be listed here.

On character rather than content, the V&A makes two attributed observations. It states that Morris's wallpaper designs centre on plant-based forms and are stylised evocations of natural forms rather than literal transcriptions. It also notes that many of Morris's later patterns, notably Acanthus and St James's, are on a grand scale. The museum pairs the two designs directly on that point.

Readers who want a comparable large-scale pattern in detail can follow the story of Acanthus, which the V&A sets alongside St James's for scale.

Two specimens and a pattern book

Surviving evidence for the design rests largely on two specimens in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The first carries museum number O248672. The second, O248674, was printed with a dark-red ground, so the design is recorded in at least two colour schemes.

Both specimens are inscribed on the back in ink with title, number and price. The price itself is not stated in the records available here.

The specimens belong to Volume 1, a pattern book containing 25 Morris & Co. patterns from 1862 to 1881, held under the reference E.441-529-1919. St James's, dated 1881 by the V&A, sits at the end of that span, among the newest sheets in the volume.

Points the records leave open

A few points should be stated plainly. The status of the 1881 date, whether it marks the design's drawing or its first issue, is not established by the evidence. The V&A's own material gives two vertical repeat measurements, 119.4 cm and 127 cm, and they do not agree.

No documented statement by Morris about St James's appears in the records used for this page, and no later reissues of the wallpaper are recorded in them either. Where popular accounts list reprints or licensed versions, they cannot be confirmed from this evidence and are left out here.

A related fabric, and a caution

The V&A also holds a furnishing fabric called St James, a woven silk with museum number O271081, dated 1881 and designed by William Morris for Morris & Co. It was commissioned for use in the Throne Room and Blue Room at St James's Palace.

A caution follows. The evidence available does not establish whether the silk shares its design with the St James's wallpaper or is a distinct design with a similar name. The two should not be treated as one pattern without further documentation.

Seeing St James's among Morris's wallpapers

In the V&A's account, St James's belongs with the grand-scale end of Morris's wallpaper output, paired with Acanthus. Against the full run of the firm's papers, from small-scale florals to these large architectural patterns, it marks the scale a palace staircase asked for. The Morris wallpaper list sets it in that wider sequence.

If the pairing interests you, our article on Acanthus covers the other design the V&A names here. Readers planning a purchase should note that original Victorian rolls do not come to market under this design in the records used for this page, so any modern St James's paper is a later printing unless documented otherwise. Our own William Morris Original Designs collection offers faithful prints of Morris patterns for walls, chosen and captioned against museum records.