William Morris Designs by Decade: 1860s to 1890s

What this list includes and how it was verified

This page lists designs, not biography. The biography of Morris's life, his firm and his campaigns is covered elsewhere; here the unit of record is a named design with a date, a maker and a source. The chronology runs from the first wallpapers of the early 1860s to the Bullerswood carpet of 1889.

The verification method is simple. Where the V&A is the only source for a date or an attribution, the sentence says so, and the item is treated as an attributed claim rather than an independently confirmed fact.

The scale of the wallpaper work gives a sense of the whole. According to the V&A, Morris produced over 50 wallpapers during his career, and the museum states that the success of these designs relies on his well-practiced and close observation of nature. Only a subset of those papers carries a firm date in the records used for this list, and only those dated items appear in the tables below.

Context matters for the 1860s start date. The V&A records that in the early 1860s the British wallpaper market was booming, with mass-produced papers offering a cheaper alternative to textile-based wall decoration. Into that market, Morris made wallpaper one of the first things his new interior decorations company put into serial production.

The 1860s: the first wallpapers

According to the V&A, the first paper Morris designed was Trellis in 1862, a pattern suggested by the rose trellis in the garden of Red House, Morris's home in Kent. The second was Daisy in 1864, a simple design of naively drawn meadow flowers, and the next pattern was Fruit in 1865, which demonstrated the same informal naturalism as the first two designs.

The V&A characterises these early papers as subtle, stylised evocations of natural forms rather than literal transcriptions. The museum also states that every one of Morris's wallpaper designs centres on plant-based forms, whether in a luxuriantly naturalistic style, as in Acanthus or Pimpernel, or a flatter, more formalised one, as in Sunflower or St James's Ceiling. Note that the V&A does not give design dates for Acanthus or Pimpernel in the records used here, so they are not listed as dated items.

One caution on the firm attribution. The evidence used for this list does not name the interior decorations company Morris founded, so the maker credit for the 1860s wallpapers cannot be stated beyond Morris as designer. The gaps section returns to this point.

The 1870s: printed and woven textiles

The 1870s shift the centre of gravity from wallpaper to textiles. The story of Morris's natural dyes belongs to that collaboration.

According to the V&A, the first textile likely to have been printed by Wardle is Marigold, dated 1875, a dense pattern Morris also used for wallpaper. The following year, 1876, saw the registration of Tulip and Rose, which the V&A identifies as the first dateable design by Morris for a woven furnishing textile. Both dates rest on the V&A's record alone and are stated here as attributed claims.

The woven work had deep sources. The V&A records that Morris studied early woven textiles in the collections of the South Kensington Museum, later the V&A, and that many of his designs were inspired by 16th- and 17th-century Italian silks.

The decade closes with a return to wallpaper. The V&A dates the wallpaper Sunflower to 1879 and records it as designed by William Morris, manufactured and printed by Jeffrey & Co., in England. The museum holds the paper under Museum no. E.513-1919, which makes it one of the few items in this list with a documented museum number.

A note on what the 1870s table does not contain. The V&A's account names Acanthus and Pimpernel as examples of Morris's luxuriantly naturalistic wallpaper style, but the records used here give no design dates for either paper, so they stay out of the dated list. The same applies to St James's Ceiling, whose medium the evidence does not confirm.

The late 1870s and 1880s: weaving, tapestry and carpets

Weaving came last among the crafts Morris taught himself. The V&A records that of the textile techniques he learned, he left weaving until last, and that he called weaving, in his lecture The Lesser Arts of 1877, the noblest of all the weaving arts.

According to the V&A, Acanthus and Vine was finished in 1879 and apparently took 516 and a half hours to complete, worked at dawn in Morris's bedroom.

Production scaled up in the 1880s. The V&A records that tapestry weaving was established at Merton Abbey when company production was consolidated there in 1881, and that Morris appointed John Henry Dearle to manage production. The museum also states that large tapestry commissions were often designed by Morris, Dearle and other artists in collaboration, and executed by the company's weavers on Flemish-style looms Morris had built. Attribution for tapestry work after 1881 therefore needs care: the designer credit may be shared.

Carpets belong to the same stretch of years. The V&A records that in the late 1870s, inspired by his study of Persian rugs, Morris moved into carpet production by hand, reviving hand-knotting and making small rugs at home. In 1879, according to the museum, he began to oversee the hand-knotting of Hammersmith rugs in limited runs on looms installed in outbuildings at his London house, and the looms were moved to Merton Abbey in 1881, where Morris & Company produced large Hammersmith rugs for interiors commissions.

The last dated item in this list is the Bullerswood carpet. The V&A dates it to 1889 and records that Morris & Company produced it for John Sanderson, a wool trader living at Bullerswood in Chislehurst, Kent. The museum's record, as available here, does not state who designed it, so the design credit is left open rather than assigned.

The woven cloths deserve a closing note on character. The V&A records that Morris produced designs for woven cloths for around a decade with significant commercial success, using silk, mohair and wool, and embellished some patterns with gold threads.

Gaps, disputed attributions and notes

The title of this page promises four decades, and honesty requires saying what the evidence delivers. The records used here date no designs to the 1890s, so the decade-by-decade list cannot be completed for that decade from this evidence. The chronology above runs from 1862 to 1889 and stops there.

The following points are not settled by the sources used for this list:

• No designs from the 1890s carry dates in the current evidence, so the 1890s section of the timeline is empty here rather than invented.
• The V&A records the firm as producer of the Bullerswood carpet and Morris as overseeing the hand-knotting of the rugs, and no further credit is stated.
• The evidence does not name the interior decorations company Morris founded, so the firm credit for the 1860s wallpapers cannot be stated.
• No items excluded from the list, and the reasons for their exclusion, are documented in the evidence used here.
• The evidence gives no design dates for the Acanthus or Pimpernel wallpapers, and does not confirm whether St James's Ceiling is a wallpaper or another medium, so none of the three appears as a dated item.

On disputes: the sources used here contain no direct conflicts between institutions. The practical caution is different. Most of the dates above rest on a single institutional source, the V&A, and are marked as attributed claims in the text. That is not a weakness unique to Morris; it is the normal condition of design history, and it is why each row in the tables names its source.

How to use this list

If you are researching a specific design, start with its row and check the attribution before the date. The maker line matters as much as the date line.

If you are a student, use the decade structure to see the shift in medium: wallpapers first in the 1860s, printed and woven textiles through the 1870s, then tapestry and carpets from the late 1870s into the 1880s. If you are a prospective buyer, treat single-source attributions as attributed claims and look for a museum number where one exists, as with the V&A's Sunflower record, E.513-1919.

For judgement of the work itself, the V&A's characterisation is a useful anchor. The museum describes Morris's wallpaper designs as adopting a naturalistic and very British take on pattern that was both new and quietly radical, and states that every one of them centres on plant-based forms. Those readings belong to the V&A, and they are worth holding alongside the dates rather than instead of them.

Two related pages extend what this list can only sketch. Our guide to [Morris's pattern structure](L3) explains how a repeating pattern like the ones catalogued here was actually built, and the page on [Morris and nature](L2) follows the drawing practice that the V&A identifies behind the wallpaper designs.