William Morris Woven Textiles, Tapestries and Carpets: A Reference List

What This List Includes and How It Was Checked

The scope is woven work only. That covers tapestries woven on hand looms, woven furnishing cloths sold by the yard, and knotted carpets. Printed cottons, block-printed wallpapers, embroidery, painted furniture and stained glass all fall outside the definition and are handled on companion pages or named in the exclusions section below.

Verification was straightforward: each item in the main table has a museum object record held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Art Institute of Chicago. Where a date or attribution rests on a single institution's record, the sentence naming that fact credits the institution. Interpretive statements about why a design looks the way it does are credited in the same way. Readers comparing records across museums should keep the guide to design attribution in mind, since a designer credit and a weaving credit are not the same thing.

Three working rules were applied to every candidate item:

• Include an item only if a named museum record establishes the object, its medium and its attribution.
• Flag any date or attribution that a single source supports, and name that source in the sentence, as with the Victoria and Albert Museum's account of the design of Acanthus and Vine.
• Exclude anything that is not woven work by or for William Morris and Morris and Co., including wallpaper and works by other artists who share the name. The Art Institute of Chicago, for example, attributes two objects once associated with this name, The Horses of Anahita (1986.999) and Hillside with Trees (1986.1000), to the American artist William Morris Hunt (1824-1879), not to William Morris the designer.

The List: Verified Woven Works with Dates and Sources

The table below is the core of the page. It lists the woven works whose existence, medium and attribution can be checked against museum records today. Where the record names a designer but not the weaving workshop, the gap is carried into the section on open questions rather than papered over.

Tapestries: From the First Loom to the Merton Abbey Workshop

The V&A notes that Morris left weaving until last among the textile techniques he taught himself. According to the V&A's account, he called tapestry 'the noblest of all the weaving arts' and set up his first tapestry loom in 1877. The first completed piece followed in 1879: Acanthus and Vine, which the V&A records as apparently taking 516 and a half hours to complete.

The V&A reads Acanthus and Vine as a work with visible roots in older weaving. It points to the influence of large-leaf verdure tapestries woven in France and Flanders in the sixteenth century, and suggests that the panel's deliberately faded appearance was probably an attempt to recreate wall hangings Morris had seen at a hunting lodge in Epping Forest as a boy.

Production grew once the firm had proper premises. The V&A dates the establishment of tapestry weaving at Merton Abbey to 1881, when company production was consolidated at the site, and records that Morris appointed John Henry Dearle to manage production. Large commissions were often designed by Morris, Dearle and other artists in collaboration, and executed by the company's experienced weavers on Flemish-style looms that Morris had built.

The V&A also records the commercial reality behind the grand panels. By 1890 large tapestries were becoming increasingly popular with rich clients but did not offer a reliable source of income; the company made more money from smaller, affordable tapestry panels or cushions sold through the Oxford Street showroom and via overseas agents.

The two angel tapestries in the main table show how the workshop reused figure designs across decades. The V&A explains that the figures in Angeli Ministrantes were originally drawn in 1877 to 1878 by Edward Burne-Jones for stained-glass lancet windows in the south choir of Salisbury Cathedral, made in the Morris and Co. workshops. Burne-Jones's own account book, in an entry dated between March and August 1878, lists '4 colossal and sublime figures of angels 20 pounds each'.

The paper trail behind the tapestry survives. The V&A records that the original Burne-Jones cartoon for Angeli Ministrantes, in chalk on stretched paper, is in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. In 1894, according to the V&A, the cartoons were converted to tapestry with the addition of background and border designs by John Henry Dearle, and the resulting panel was woven at Merton Abbey by Morris and Co. in wool, silk and mohair on a cotton warp. A number of tapestries showing variations of the Angeli Ministrantes composition were woven by Morris and Co. in later years, and the Met's Angels Praising of 1898, designed by Burne-Jones, belongs to this family of angel subjects.

Woven Furnishing Cloths, 1876 to 1888

Morris's woven furnishing cloths have a clear start and end date. According to the V&A, Tulip and Rose, the first dateable design by Morris for a woven furnishing textile, was registered in 1876. His last identifiable designs for woven textiles were drawn in 1888, and after that point John Henry Dearle was responsible for this aspect of the company's output.

Within that decade the V&A records a body of work with significant commercial success. Silk, mohair and wool were all used in these woven cloths, and some patterns were embellished with gold threads. Most were flat jacquards in wool, popular for curtains and wall-hung drapes. Morris was also interested in producing experimental cloths created by mixing fibres in new ways.

The sources for the designs were historical and close at hand. The V&A notes 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 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian silks. Peacock and Dragon, a design of 1878 described by the museum as imposing yet popular, belongs to this group. Some of his final designs attempted to reproduce complex historical structures, such as brocaded Flemish velvets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as in Granada, a design of 1884.

Making the cloth was a separate problem. The V&A records that initially, with no facilities to weave commercial quantities of cloth, Morris relied on outside contractors. Designing effectively for embroidery, printed and woven fabrics, tapestries and carpets demanded a hands-on understanding of process, and the V&A notes that Morris relished acquiring it. Of all the textile techniques he taught himself, weaving came last.

The V&A places this weaving work in the wider pattern of Morris's career, reading it as part of his search for alternatives to what he saw as the crude ugliness of contemporary machine-age goods, and his focus on what he saw as more honest work reviving craft-based styles and techniques from the past. The firm's printed fabrics are covered on their own page, so this catalogue keeps the boundary firm and lists only woven cloth. The V&A's collections of Morris's textile work range from his first experiments in embroidery in the early 1860s to tapestry panels created only a few years before his death.

Carpets: The Swan House Carpet and the 1870s Beginnings

The Art Institute of Chicago dates Morris's carpet work to the 1870s, recording that in that decade he began designing hand-knotted and machine-made carpets, looking to Turkish and Persian rugs for inspiration. This sits alongside the woven cloth work described above and shares its historical method.

One carpet is documented in unusual detail. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the Swan House Carpet, designed by William Morris, produced by Morris and Co. of London at Merton Abbey, with a design dated about 1883 and the carpet made in 1887. Its structure is recorded precisely: cotton and wool, plain weave with supplementary wrapping wefts forming Ghiordes knots cut pile.

The carpet's provenance is unusually complete for a Morris carpet. According to the Art Institute of Chicago, 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, where the carpet was located in the hall.

What Is Excluded from This List, and Why

Two categories of confusion recur in searches for Morris woven work, so both are named here and kept out of the table.

The main exclusions are:

• Wallpaper. The Met's Pink and Rose, accession number 23.163.4a, designed by William Morris around 1890 and block-printed in distemper colours, is classified by the museum as wallpaper, not a woven textile, so it does not belong on this list. Wallpaper designs are gathered on the wallpaper list.
• Works by other artists named Morris. The Art Institute of Chicago objects The Horses of Anahita (1986.999) and Hillside with Trees (1986.1000) are works by the American artist William Morris Hunt, 1824 to 1879, not by William Morris the designer.
• Non-woven media in general. Embroidery, stained glass, tiles and painted furniture are separate categories and are excluded because this page defines itself by woven work only.

The dividing line is medium and maker, not appearance. A design can look like a woven textile and still be printed paper, and an artist can share a name with Morris and have nothing to do with the firm. Checking both, as the parent attribution guide sets out, is the habit this page tries to model.

Gaps, Uncertain Points and Open Questions

A reference list should say where it runs out of evidence. The following points are not established by the records used for this page, and no reader should treat them as settled.

Open questions include:

• The Met's record for Angels Praising (Angeli Laudantes), 2008.8a-c, gives Burne-Jones as designer but does not name the weaving workshop or site.
• The full provenance of the Met's woven textile Bird (23.163.15), including whether it was woven by Morris and Co., is not stated in the museum record used here, which gives only the designer, the design date of 1878 and a wool medium.
• The complete list of Morris's woven cloth designs, with dates and sources for each design, is beyond what the evidence here supports. The named designs are Tulip and Rose, registered in 1876 according to the Victoria and Albert Museum, Peacock and Dragon, Granada and Bird.
• The exact relationship between the Angeli Ministrantes composition, dated 1894 in the Victoria and Albert Museum's record, and the Met's Angels Praising (Angeli Laudantes), 2008.8a-c, dated 1898 in the Met's record, is not established by these records, beyond the fact that later variations on the Angeli Ministrantes composition were woven and that both subjects centre on angels.

Related Lists

The categories excluded from this page have their own reference pages. Wallpaper designs are collected in the story of the Morris wallpaper list, and the printed cottons and chintzes in the Morris chintz list.

Companion pages for wider research:

• Morris, Morris and Co. or Morris style? How designs are attributed, the parent guide to the attribution questions behind this list.
• Complete list of William Morris wallpaper designs, covering the printed papers excluded here.
• List of William Morris printed textiles, covering the chintzes and printed cottons that sit outside the woven category.

For readers who want to go on from woven work to the firm's fabrics more broadly, the next step is the printed textiles page, which covers the block-printed cottons that Morris produced in parallel with the weaves catalogued here.