Blackberry by John Henry Dearle

Two bramble stems approach one another, cross, and open into a slender loop. Thorns interrupt their smooth outlines; toothed leaves and small pink flowers spread into the spaces around them. In a green-ground version of Blackberry, the growth is unusually easy to follow. Large areas of quiet colour remain between the branches, giving the smallest blossom room to register. This is a Morris & Co. wallpaper designed by John Henry Dearle, whose name the William Morris Gallery explicitly credits on its surviving Sanderson reprint. ^[1]

The distinction matters because the firm's name can easily become a mistaken attribution to William Morris himself. The Victoria and Albert Museum likewise names Dearle as designer of three Blackberry specimens catalogued as made in 1903. These provide a firmer historical anchor than the dates of later sample books and reprints, while leaving the precise circumstances of the design's first creation open. ^{[2] [3] [4]}

Blackberry rewards attention both as a pattern and as a product with a long life. Its restrained arrangement shows how much can be done with a familiar plant, a few clear lines and carefully distributed empty space. Its surviving examples also show why a wallpaper's designer, publisher, printer and printing date need to be understood separately.

Following the bramble stems

The V&A describes its later Blackberry reprint as an almost symmetrical, formal arrangement of bramble stems, green leaves and pink flowers on a pale ground. That description identifies the governing tension: the plant remains recognisable, but its growth has been organised into a repeat. The stems themselves carry the order, joining the flowers and leaves into a continuous framework. ^[16]

In the green-ground example, a pair of tall, thorny stems forms a narrow passage through the centre. Their crossing below produces a pointed enclosure, almost like a small opening in a fence. Lateral branches then lead the eye towards leaves and clusters of flowers at either side. The eye can follow one stem continuously, then move across to the answering stem. This gives the design a steady rhythm without requiring a separate drawn trellis.

The thorns are particularly effective. Their short angular projections break the long curves into a sequence of small events. They also keep the plant from becoming a bland floral scroll: even at this scale, a bramble has a wiry, resistant character. The leaves supply a different kind of articulation. Their toothed edges and interior veins make compact, sharply defined shapes against the ground, while the blossoms offer rounded centres of attention.

No obvious ripe berries appear in this green-ground crop. The title invites recognition of the plant, but the visible interest lies in its stems, leaves and blossoms. Reading the image closely means allowing those features to do the work, without adding a harvest scene or a symbolic meaning that the illustration does not establish.

The open spaces are active parts of the arrangement. Between the upright stems they become long channels; beside a leaf they widen into pockets of colour. Seen from farther away, these spaces help separate one spray from the next. Seen closely, they make the different contours legible. The pattern's relative sparseness therefore involves exact decisions about placement, even though it uses less overlapping foliage than many familiar Morris & Co. papers.

Dearle within Morris & Co.

Dearle's authorship places Blackberry within the firm's continuing design practice. Lesley Baker's study of his contribution to Morris & Co. describes a designer trained inside the business, beginning with his employment in 1878 and work in the glass-painting room. Baker presents his later work as distinctive while also grounded in the company's established principles. Her account of the 1905 reorganisation identifies Henry Currie Marillier as managing director and Dearle as artistic director. ^[5]

That history helps explain why a Dearle design can look convincingly at home within Morris & Co. His familiarity with its work was practical and sustained. A company style could be learned through drawing, materials and production, then developed through new choices of spacing, outline and colour. Recognising this continuity gives Dearle a more useful place in the story than treating him as an anonymous custodian of someone else's patterns.

Baker also examines the commercial advantage the company gained from Morris's name after his death. Her argument draws attention to the danger of accepting the firm's branding as a reliable guide to every individual attribution. It does not follow, however, that Dearle was never named publicly. The Furniture History Society's catalogue-derived index of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society records two wallpaper panels in the 1899 exhibition, number 198, and seven more, number 464, explicitly credited as designed by H. Dearle. The second group was executed and exhibited by Morris & Co. ^[17]

Those entries separate the designer's job from the firm's role with unusual clarity. They do not identify the individual papers as Blackberry, so they cannot supply an earlier date for this particular design. Their value is broader: Dearle was a publicly credited wallpaper designer before the V&A's 1903 Blackberry specimens. For this paper, the present collection records provide the specific attribution; the exhibition evidence explains the professional setting in which such work belonged. ^{[1] [2] [17]}

A familiar plant made into a wall pattern

William Morris's own writing supplies a useful way to examine the design tradition Dearle inherited. In Some Hints on Pattern-Designing, delivered in 1881, Morris argued that an ornamental pattern needed clear forms and an intelligible suggestion of growth. He wanted one element to appear to spring vigorously from another. He also warned against taking a natural spray and forcing it into arbitrary decorative lines. The overall idea should guide the drawing of individual leaves, flowers and thorns. ^[18]

Morris's argument offers a vocabulary for looking at Blackberry. The bramble can be read as connected growth. Leaves have stems, flowers gather at the ends of branches, and the framework retains the appearance of a plant continuing beyond the visible portion. At the same time, paired stems and recurrent clusters make a structure that nature would not provide in such regular form. This comparison concerns shared design principles; it does not establish Morris's personal involvement in Dearle's paper.

Wallpaper posed a particular problem in Morris's lecture. Unlike a cloth, it would lie flat, without folds to complicate its appearance. The designer therefore had to distribute the pattern across the ground and disguise its construction enough to avoid making the viewer count the repeats. Morris's ideal involved a balance between order and the pleasure of tracing it. ^[18]

Blackberry makes that balance easy to explore. The principal stems offer a clear route through the design, but leaf groups and flower clusters pull attention sideways. A close view brings the paired framework forward; a wider view encourages the eye to jump between small sprays. Its empty ground does not abolish the repeat. It gives the repeat's different parts enough separation for these two ways of seeing to coexist.

Morris also favoured familiar plants as resources for invention. Their everyday recognisability could support associations beyond a literal drawing. That argument helps explain the possibilities of a bramble in domestic decoration without assigning Blackberry a private story or a fixed symbolic message. The transformation from plant to wallpaper is already substantial: irregular growth becomes a repeat that can extend across a wall. ^[18]

Three colourways, three readings of the same growth

The William Morris Gallery's wallpaper pattern book BlB90, dated approximately 1913–17, preserves three Blackberry colourways. Number 389 combines pinks, greens and pale brown on white. Number 397 uses two greens, white, ochre and tan on a light green ground. Number 388 combines two pinks, cream, light sandy brown and pale green on dull green. All three entries name J. H. Dearle. These are alternative colour arrangements of the same named design. ^[6]

The choices affect more than the flowers. Changing the ground changes every gap between the stems and leaves. On white, the plant shapes can read as separate, lightly scattered sprays. On dull green, pale stems become more conspicuous and the spaces around them acquire a stronger colour of their own. This is particularly significant in an open pattern: so much ground remains exposed that its colour participates in the structure throughout.

The Brooklyn Museum's photograph of page 21 from Wallpaper Sample Book 1, identified as Blackberry, pattern 389, offers a useful white-ground comparison. Pink flowers, green leaf groups and ochre-coloured stems remain clearly separated against the pale surface. The photograph shows the bound page and its edges, making the sample's character as a handled commercial object visible. The museum-contributed image metadata dates the sample book to 1915–17; that is a date for the surviving sample-book context, not a replacement for the V&A's earlier catalogue evidence. ^[19]

A sample book also changes how the design is encountered. Instead of filling a room, one colourway sits on a page beside other choices. BlB90's cover tells customers to quote the name and number when ordering and offers larger patterns on application. Its later attached label distinguishes stocked papers from those requiring special quotations for printing to order. The repeated design, its colour number and the quantity required were parts of a transaction as well as elements of decoration. The surviving book therefore records a range of choices available to customers, rather than one mandatory palette for Blackberry. ^[6]

What the surviving papers tell us about printing

The V&A's three historical Blackberry leaves belong to a stand-mounted wallpaper pattern book containing 132 specimens. Their records name Morris & Co. as publisher, Dearle as designer and 1903 as the date made. The date is catalogue evidence for those specimens; it does not establish an exact registration day or document the moment Dearle first put pencil to paper. The book itself contains papers dated across a much wider span, from 1880 to 1917. ^{[2] [3] [4]}

Its cover also preserves the company's explanation of hand printing. As transcribed by the V&A, each block was dipped in pigment and pressed onto the paper, with each separate colour drying before the next application. The advertisement contrasts this slow accumulation with machine printing, which it describes as applying the colours at once and drying them rapidly. It then recommends hand printing for permanent use. This is valuable evidence of how the firm explained and sold its process. Its claim of superior permanence remains a commercial claim, rather than a comparative conservation test. ^[2]

The distinction between the cover's argument and an individual leaf matters here. The exact V&A records describe the three Blackberry specimens as colour woodblock or machine prints. The general advertisement cannot resolve that uncertainty for each sheet. Nor do these records name a historical printer, so the publisher's name should not be expanded into an unsupported account of who physically printed them. ^{[2] [3] [4]}

Later examples are more specific in other ways. The V&A's pale-ground Blackberry was reprinted by Arthur Sanderson & Sons around 1955. The William Morris Gallery's B179 is a Sanderson printing from approximately the 1960s, described as block-printed in distemper. The Gallery explains that Sanderson acquired Morris & Co.'s original wallpaper blocks when the company closed in 1940. These dates describe the continued production of an existing design. Dearle remains its designer even when another firm prints a fresh sheet decades later. ^{[16] [1]}

This long production history also cautions against treating the colour of any one surviving example as the universal original. The early sample books already document alternatives, and the later reprints have their own material histories. A photograph may reveal the arrangement very well while representing a particular edition and palette. ^{[6] [16]}

Blackberry beside Hyacinth

Dearle's Hyacinth makes an illuminating comparison. The William Morris Gallery describes that early twentieth-century design as using clear outlines and an ogee shape to connect its repeat. An ogee combines opposed curves, giving the pattern a more visibly enclosing framework. The Gallery's example was printed by Sanderson in 1968 from original Morris & Co. blocks, so it also demonstrates the separation between design and later manufacture. ^[20]

In a pink-ground version of Hyacinth, large pale leaves and varied flower forms occupy much of the space within the connecting curves. Blackberry allows its paired brambles to stand farther apart. Its branches do much of the organising work, while plain ground remains visible between the sprays. The difference directs attention towards Dearle's choices within the broader Morris & Co. repertoire: a consistent concern with recognisable growth and clear contour could accommodate markedly different densities.

Baker argues for taking Dearle's individuality and craft understanding seriously. Blackberry provides a particularly legible opportunity to do so. Following its thorns and crossings, then comparing the same growth on white and green, reveals a designer working with the relations between line, colour and interval. The bramble's character survives in the smallest angular projections; the wall pattern emerges in the measured spaces around them. ^[5]