List of William Morris Printed Textiles (Chintzes)

How this list was compiled

The inclusion criteria are strict. A design appears in the table only if it is a printed textile, not a wallpaper or a woven cloth, and only if a museum record gives it a date and an attribution. The Victoria and Albert Museum's account of Morris's printed fabrics provides the dates and techniques for most entries, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's catalogue records supply the entries for 'Honeysuckle' and 'Kennet'.

Verification worked in one direction only. Every claim in this article traces back to a named institutional record, and nothing has been drawn from memory or general knowledge. If a date is missing from the sources used here, the cell is left open rather than filled with a likely guess. Readers who want the wider question of who drew which design, and how Morris the man differs from the firm Morris & Co., should read the parent guide to design attribution.

The distinction between printed and unprinted work matters because Morris & Co. produced textiles by several methods. The sources used here cover printed fabrics, and the list therefore excludes woven furnishing textiles and carpets, which are covered separately. One exclusion worth stating early: 'Pink and Rose', held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and dated around 1890, is classified by the Met as wallpaper, block printed in distemper colors under accession number 23.163.4a, so it does not belong on a chintz list despite its appearance alongside textile designs in many searches.

A second exclusion is a matter of names rather than media. The Art Institute of Chicago records two works sometimes encountered in Morris searches, 'The Horses of Anahita' (object 1986.999) and 'Hillside with Trees' (object 1986.1000), as paintings by William Morris Hunt, the American artist who lived from 1824 to 1879. They have no connection to the English designer and are listed in the exclusions section below so that researchers are not misled.

The list: Morris printed textiles with dates and sources

The table below is the core of this page. The first row records an unnamed starting point: the Victoria and Albert Museum notes that the first printed fabrics made by Morris's company, in 1868, were copies of 1830s white-ground chintzes, produced at Clarkson in Lancashire using blocks rather than the modern roller method. Whether those copies ever received design names is not established by the sources used here, so the entry is left without one.

Dates in the table follow the museum record that states them. Where a design has both a registration date and a printing date, both are given, as with 'Honeysuckle' and 'Kennet'. Attribution for each design follows the source; the V&A and the Met both credit William Morris as designer.

Nine rows, no more. If only these items can be verified against the records used here, the list stops at nine. A longer table would be more impressive and less true, and this page is built to be checked line by line.

Notes on the designs: dyes, printers and repeats

The 1868 Clarkson prints set the terms for everything that followed. According to the V&A, the company's first printed fabrics copied 1830s white-ground chintzes and were block printed at Clarkson in Lancashire, a deliberate step away from the modern roller method. The same record describes these copies as effectively a test for 'Jasmine Trellis', Morris's first actual textile design, which was simplified to suit the palette of the mostly chemical dyes Clarkson used.

'Tulip and Willow' of 1873 came next. The V&A records that Morris was happier with this design, though he was disappointed by the crude effect achieved with Prussian blue dye. Chemical dyes were the practical reality of the Clarkson period, and their limits shaped what the designs could look like.

In 1875 Morris changed printers and changed dyes. Keen to re-establish the use of natural dyes, he began working with Thomas Wardle, the owner of a dyeing works in Leek, Staffordshire. The V&A identifies 'Marigold', also from 1875, as the first textile likely to have been printed by Wardle. It is a dense pattern, and Morris also used it for wallpaper.

'Honeysuckle' sits at the midpoint of the list. It is one of only two designs in this table with a full museum accession number attached.

The year 1883 brought both the best-known entry and a technical shift. The V&A records that Morris used the complex indigo-discharge print method to produce 'Strawberry Thief', which was expensive but one of the company's most successful designs. The same museum notes the design's subject: the fruit-stealing thrushes in the kitchen garden of Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire.

'Wandle' and 'Cray', both 1884, close the list. The V&A describes 'Wandle' as the largest repeat Morris attempted, at 98.4 x 44.5 cm, and 'Cray' as his last significant design for a printed textile. After these, the printed side of the firm's textile work was effectively complete, though printing itself continued at the company's works.

Gaps, disputed attributions and items excluded

This list has limits that a reader should know before citing it. The gaps fall into four groups, each stated plainly below.

Items that the sources used here do not establish:

• No complete institutional inventory of Morris chintzes exists in the records used for this page. Nine dated entries are verified; anything beyond them cannot be confirmed from these sources.
• Several designs in the table, including 'Jasmine Trellis', 'Tulip and Willow', 'Marigold', 'Strawberry Thief', 'Wandle' and 'Cray', have no museum numbers or holding details in the evidence used here. A date and an attribution are given, but no accession record.
• The status of the 1868 Clarkson white-ground copies is unclear. The sources do not say whether these prints received design names, or who drew them.
• 'Pink and Rose' is excluded because the Met classifies it as wallpaper, not a printed textile. Its date is given as around 1890 and its technique as block printing in distemper colors.
• Works by William Morris Hunt are excluded because they are by a different artist. The Art Institute of Chicago attributes 'The Horses of Anahita' (1986.999) and 'Hillside with Trees' (1986.1000) to Hunt, the American painter of 1824 to 1879.

Nothing in the evidence used here records a dispute between institutions over any of the nine entries, so no disagreements are reported. Where a claim rests on a single museum record, that record is named in the text. The broader question of how designs are assigned to Morris personally rather than to Morris & Co. is treated in the guide to how Morris designs are attributed, which explains the difference between the designer and the firm.

Related lists: wallpaper and woven work

Printed textiles are one strand of a larger body of work. Morris also designed wallpapers, and the separate guide to the Morris wallpaper designs list covers those patterns in the same sourced format. The V&A notes that many of Morris's woven designs drew on 16th- and 17th-century Italian silks, and that he studied early woven textiles in the collections of the South Kensington Museum, later the V&A.

Woven furnishing textiles, tapestries and carpets are outside the scope of this page and are covered in the reference list of Morris woven textiles, tapestries and carpets. One example shows why the separation matters: the Art Institute of Chicago holds the 'Swan House' Carpet, designed by William Morris, produced by Morris & Co. in London and made at Merton Abbey, with a design date of around 1883 and a making date of 1887. The museum also records that it was among the original furnishings of the John J. Glessner House on Prairie Avenue in Chicago, a house designed by Henry Hobson Richardson and completed in 1887. That is a carpet, not a chintz, and it belongs on the other list.

For further research, the V&A holds extensive collections of Morris's work in textiles, ranging from his first experiments in embroidery in the early 1860s through to tapestry panels he helped to create a few years before his death. Readers assembling their own notes may also find it useful to browse the collection of William Morris original designs held on this site.