Chrysanthemum

A pale chrysanthemum opens like a small wheel among leaves that curl, split and turn back upon themselves. Another blossom presents its petals at a different angle; behind both, much smaller leafy sprays fill the remaining spaces. In William Morris’s Chrysanthemum, the flowers attract the eye first, but the foliage keeps it moving. The design rewards a second look because its abundance is organised: each generous bloom belongs to a larger rhythm that continues beyond the edge of the paper.

The original wallpaper design survives at the William Morris Gallery as a pencil and watercolour drawing dated 1877. Its unfinished lower portion reveals a pencil grid beneath the pattern, giving unusually direct evidence of how Morris planned and repeated his forms by hand. The apparent freedom of the growing plants rests on deliberate construction. ^[1]

The cream, green and olive reproduction illustrated here brings that relationship into focus. It is a digitally enhanced historical image supplied by Rawpixel from a Smithsonian Institution source. Its colours describe this reproduction; they do not establish an original Victorian palette. Other surviving drawings and printed samples let us examine separate questions: how Morris studied the flower, how the wallpaper was made, and how later printers changed its colour. ^[2]

Flowers that turn through the pattern

Look first at the difference between an open flower and one seen obliquely. Some blossoms in the illustrated reproduction have a conspicuous centre surrounded by a crowded ring of petals. Others spread their broad outer petals around a centre partly concealed by the turn of the head. The effect is more varied than a sequence of identical circular badges. Each flower offers the eye a slightly different route through its overlapping forms. Fine ochre lines travel along the pale petals, giving them direction without dissolving their outlines into soft shadow. ^[2]

The larger foliage has another character. Its jagged edges, hooked tips and curling lobes create strong directional movements around the blossoms. A leaf can seem to stretch upward, then turn over at its end; a stem passes through the composition with a steadier curve. The flowers occupy broad areas of light, while the more divided leaves break those areas into an intricate surrounding structure. Following the leaves is as important as identifying the flower: they carry much of the pattern’s movement. ^[2]

There is also a change of scale. The small sprays behind the main flowers and leaves are comparatively simple, with narrow leaf shapes attached to branching stems. They keep the dark ground active even where the foreground opens out. They also make the large blossoms feel larger. Cover one of these background passages with a finger and the composition becomes abruptly emptier; uncover it and the layered density returns. This is a useful way to see how much work an apparently secondary motif performs. ^[2]

The plants suggest overlapping growth without becoming a view into a realistically measured garden. There is no horizon, pot or surrounding landscape to fix their position. Instead, the eye moves between pale blossoms, curled foliage and the smaller growth behind them. A close view offers detailed petals and leaf edges; from farther away, these resolve into alternating light and dark masses. Both readings are present in the same surface. ^[2]

The grid beneath the leaves

The Gallery’s original drawing, A33, is a substantial working sheet, measuring 101.6 × 67.3 cm. Its lower portion preserves pencil work before the addition of watercolour. The Gallery explains that the grid helped Morris repeat and transfer elements by hand within the design. This is evidence of a practical method: a framework allowed relationships between forms to be carried across the sheet. It does not establish the precise procedure by which this particular drawing was subsequently translated onto printing blocks. ^[1]

The difference matters when looking at Morris’s drawings. A working design can show both an intended effect and the means of obtaining it. Here the pencil structure and the painted foliage belong to different stages of the same task. The grid controls placement; the coloured forms make that control less immediately conspicuous. The drawing makes the wallpaper’s order tangible: the position of each form had to work within a larger arrangement. ^[1]

A separate sheet at the Huntington narrows attention to the flower itself. Catalogued around 1877, it is in pen, wash and graphite and measures 38.7 × 25.4 cm. The museum describes two flowers: the upper one faces right, the lower one left, with some stem visible below the blossoms. This is accession 2000.5.61, a different object from the Gallery’s much larger A33. ^[13]

The two sheets answer different questions. The Huntington study isolates opposing flower orientations; A33 shows the demands of arranging a complete wallpaper pattern. The smaller drawing makes the turning blossom a subject in its own right, while the larger one places flowers within a continuous system of foliage. No documented sequence establishes that one was copied directly into the other. A study of two heads and a full repeating design require different decisions. ^{[1] [13]}

From a painted design to printed paper

A printed specimen at the Victoria and Albert Museum supplies a further stage of evidence. E.802-1915 is catalogued to 1877 and described as a colour woodblock print on paper. The record assigns separate jobs to William Morris as designer, Jeffrey & Co. as printer, and Morris & Co. as publisher. The finished wallpaper was the product of that chain of work. Its authorship does not mean that Morris personally printed every surviving sheet. ^[3]

The V&A places Chrysanthemum among the richly interwoven wallpapers of Morris’s 1870s development. These designs combined scrolling foliage with foreground and background patterns, demanding more elaborate printing than his earlier, simpler papers. The practical challenge is easy to appreciate here: the design depends on clear relationships among small lines, large pale flowers and a closely occupied ground. Printing had to preserve those relationships as the pattern continued across the paper. The exact number of blocks used for Chrysanthemum is not established by this general account. ^[14]

The V&A specimen also retains evidence of selling and handling wallpaper. It belongs to a pattern book and bears an ink inscription on the reverse, transcribed as “Chrysanthemum 92”. The record notes title, number and price information, but the transcribed number alone should not be converted into a price or a date. The sample offered a customer a physical piece of the printed design, carrying information beyond the image visible on its face. ^[3]

Measurements need equal care. The V&A lists 84.7 × 66.7 cm explicitly as the size of the volume. Those figures cannot be used as the wallpaper’s repeat dimensions or compared directly with A33 as though both records measured the same thing. A drawing, a printed sample, a bound book and the unit that repeats across a wall are distinct objects or measurements. For Chrysanthemum, the surviving records are stronger on the identity of these particular objects than on a universal numerical repeat. ^{[1] [3]}

Why the structure does not dominate

Morris later explained the special difficulty of wallpaper design in Some Hints on Pattern-Designing, delivered in 1881. A paper lies flat against a wall: it cannot rely on the folds of cloth to interrupt its geometry. He therefore advised designers to disguise the construction sufficiently to discourage counting repeats, occupy the ground evenly and guard against accidental lines that appear when a pattern spreads across a wall. This later lecture helps explain a design problem already visible in Chrysanthemum; it was delivered four years after the dated drawing. ^[15]

In the illustrated pattern, the repeated blossoms remain discoverable. Choose one open flower and it is possible to locate its counterpart. Yet the curling leaves and smaller sprays give the eye many competing paths. Attention can shift from one petal to a hooked leaf, then down a stem and into the background growth. The repeat supplies continuity while the internal detail makes tracing it an absorbing activity. ^[2]

Morris’s lecture also insists on firm outlines and convincing connections between growing forms. Those principles offer a useful way of looking at the crisp boundaries here. The foliage can be complex because its edges remain legible; a blossom can be full because its petals retain direction. Recognisable flowers become the material of an ordered surface, with the overall arrangement governing the treatment of individual parts. ^{[2] [15]}

A design with more than one colour history

The V&A’s 1877 specimen provides a documented period colourway. Its catalogue describes pale flowers facing upward to left and right in alternating rows, small gold foliage and a grey ground. That combination establishes one historical appearance of the pattern. It does not authenticate every cream or green reproduction as the same specimen, and the enhanced illustration here has not been identified with E.802-1915. ^{[2] [3]}

A later Morris & Co. pattern book at the William Morris Gallery, B46, records another arrangement: lime green outlines, pale grey-greens and dull beige against dark green. The book is catalogued after 1917 and was printed by Jeffrey & Co. Its cover promoted wallpapers by Morris and his associates alongside furnishing fabrics in suitable colours. Chrysanthemum appears within that continuing business of matching and choosing interiors, rather than as an isolated drawing detached from use. ^[16]

That commercial setting helps explain the value of keeping colourways separate. A person choosing the paper encountered a particular printed combination, with a particular relationship between light flower heads and darker surrounding growth. Changing those relationships changes what the eye finds first. In the illustrated cream and green version, the pale flowers stand out strongly, but the leaves also carry substantial areas of light colour. The small background sprays remain clearly visible between them. The design has several levels of emphasis available for a printer’s choice of palette. ^[2]

The Gallery’s B172 shows a much later intervention. It was printed around 1960 by Arthur Sanderson & Sons in distemper, using purple and turquoise. The Gallery explicitly identifies this as a colourway outside the original Morris & Co. range and suggests that Sanderson updated it for customers in the 1960s. Sanderson had acquired the original wallpaper printing blocks when Morris & Co. closed in 1940. Continuity of blocks could therefore coexist with a substantial change of colour. ^[17]

This purple and turquoise paper is separate from the cream and green illustration. It also gives a concrete example of how a later manufacturer could keep the underlying design while presenting it to a different generation. A blossom’s outline might remain recognisable even as the colour relationships changed the balance between its foreground and background. Dating the design to 1877 and the Sanderson printing to about 1960 preserves both parts of that history. ^{[1] [17]}

The Gallery’s Sanderson sample book B89, dated 1964, records a hand-printed Morris Collection. Its Chrysanthemum entry describes the lime green, pale grey-green, beige and dark green combination also found in B46. The two catalogue descriptions suggest the persistence of that palette alongside the distinct purple and turquoise updating; they do not prove that the physical samples were printed at the same time. ^{[16] [18]}

B89 also dates the design to 1876, whereas the original drawing and the V&A’s specific printed specimen are catalogued to 1877. That discrepancy remains in the collection records. The 1877 date used here follows the original drawing’s catalogue record, while the later book preserves evidence of colour and continued production. Reading each object on its own terms lets the wallpaper’s history extend beyond its invention: flowers conceived on a gridded working sheet continued to be printed, selected and recoloured long after Morris’s lifetime. ^{[1] [3] [18]}