Evenlode

Large pale flowers shine out of Evenlode’s dark ground, while blue leaves curl around their stems and smaller pink blossoms fill the spaces between. In the surviving textile reproduction, a flower with a round, crosshatched red centre provides a particularly clear point of orientation. Follow the stems away from it and the apparently crowded surface becomes a network of connected movements: rising, bending, branching and returning. The pleasure lies partly in finding that order without exhausting the detail. ^[1]

William Morris designed Evenlode as a printed furnishing textile, registered on 2 September 1883. Its name belongs to a tributary of the Thames, but its history reaches beyond the English river landscape. The William Morris Gallery identifies a seventeenth-century Italian cut velvet as its model. An English place name and the study of an imported historic textile meet in the same design. ^[2]

Evenlode also rewards attention to how it was made. Looking closely opens two connected questions: how Morris organised so much growth into a repeat, and how a workshop could turn that arrangement into cloth.

Following the pattern through the flowers

The reproduced textile contains several scales of ornament. Broad, pale petals and conspicuous flower centres establish the largest accents. Narrower, pointed blooms turn sideways or hang from curving stems. Smaller rounded heads, some with overlapping scalloped forms, bridge the intervals. Behind and between them, sharply cut blue leaves twist into hooks and scrolls. Fine yellow branches travel through the darker foliage, adding another route for the eye to follow. ^[1]

These differences keep the flowers from becoming an evenly spaced collection of badges. An upright bloom may face a downward one; a circular head is answered by a long, tapering flower. The stems carry movement between these contrasting shapes. Even where a flower seems isolated by its pale colour, its attachment to the larger plant structure brings it back into the continuous pattern. You can look at one small group as a complete arrangement, then discover that it reaches into several others. ^[1]

The dark ground matters as much as the bright ornament. It appears in irregular pockets between leaves, making the smaller tendrils legible and allowing the pale blossoms to stand forward. Yet the effect remains a flat arrangement of coloured shapes. There is no horizon or consistent viewpoint to organise a scene. Depth is suggested by overlap and differences of tone, while every portion remains available to the repeating surface. ^[1]

Morris’s own account of pattern design helps explain this combination of vitality and discipline. In his 1881 lecture, Some Hints on Pattern-Designing, he argued for firm outlines and an intelligible suggestion of growth, with one element visibly developing from another. He also described beginning with an overall idea before drawing individual flowers. His example was a rose hedge with sunlight passing through it: the imagined effect governed the details. This is a useful way of approaching Evenlode’s abundant growth, without claiming that the lecture describes its particular making. ^[14]

An Italian velvet behind an English name

The William Morris Gallery’s account connects Evenlode with a piece of seventeenth-century Italian cut velvet bought for the South Kensington Museum in 1883. Morris advised the museum on purchases for its historic textile collection. The encounter belongs to his active study of older fabrics: collecting knowledge through surviving objects, then putting that knowledge to work in contemporary design. ^[2]

The Cincinnati Art Museum also relates Evenlode to Persian velvets, alongside seventeenth-century Italian examples. Its account offers a broader interpretation without identifying an exact Persian prototype. ^[3]

This background changes how the ornament can be read. A luxuriant floral pattern with an English river name can easily seem to have sprung directly from a riverside walk. Here, the surviving documentation asks us to consider another kind of looking: the close examination of an old textile in a museum collection. Morris could study how earlier designers made flowers fill a surface, how stems connected large motifs, and how dark intervals gave bright shapes definition. The relevance of a historic model lies in those design problems as well as in individual borrowed forms.

There was also a change of material. A velvet model and a printed cotton furnishing are different kinds of object. Evenlode’s relationship to velvet concerns the invention and organisation of ornament; its manufacture had to succeed through dye and printing on cotton. The bright flowers and connected foliage had to work as a repeat produced by a different craft. ^[2]

Morris’s pattern lecture makes room for this balance between historical study and present invention. He advised designers to learn the history of their art while developing work of their own. Studying a model could sharpen a designer’s understanding; the new design still had to be invented. ^[14]

What the river name can suggest

Art historian Sarah Mead Leonard places Evenlode among nine printed fabrics named for Thames tributaries between 1883 and 1885. In her study Printed Ecologies: William Morris and the Rural Thames, she considers how Morris’s patterns evoke the environments he knew around the Upper Thames: rivers, banks, plants and managed rural landscapes. She treats these relationships as more complex than the illustration of a single view. ^[15]

Leonard gives particular attention to the meander, the sinuous movement of a principal stem across a repeat. Such curves can recall a river’s path, but she also traces their formal ancestry to historic textiles studied at South Kensington. Her interpretation allows landscape experience and knowledge of old ornament to coexist. ^[15]

For Evenlode, this provides a way to look at movement without turning the cloth into a map. Its bending stems can suggest the continuity and turning growth of a living environment. There is no established correspondence between a particular curve and a particular reach of the River Evenlode. Nor is every stylised flower securely identifiable as a local species. The name offers an association to carry into the pattern; the arrangement gives that association visual life. ^{[1] [2] [15]}

Thirty-three blocks and several kinds of colour work

Cincinnati describes thirty-three printing blocks and a dark green background made by dyeing cloth blue and overprinting yellow. It identifies Merton Abbey Works as its specimen’s printer. Resists protected areas against incoming dye, printed dye introduced colour, and discharges removed existing colour. ^[3]

Those distinctions are essential to understanding the finished surface. A pale shape against a dark field can be achieved by intervening in the colour already on the cloth, as well as by adding another colour. The making therefore has a sequence: a protected area and an area cleared after dyeing may look similar at a glance, but they arrive there through different operations. Thinking about those operations makes the clean divisions between stems, leaves and petals more remarkable. The visible pattern holds together results produced at different stages.

Thirty-three blocks therefore need not mean thirty-three visible colours: blocks could do protective and colour-removing work too. The museum does not supply a complete recipe or allocation of individual blocks. ^[3]

Morris addressed the cost of this complexity directly in his pattern lecture. Cotton printing, he said, could expend considerable trouble on an inexpensive base material; every additional process needed to earn its place by adding beauty. His argument was about the relation between effort and result. In Evenlode, the reader can test that relation visually: the fine marking within a pale petal, the small coloured details of a flower head, or a leaf separated clearly from the ground all contribute to the richness of the whole. The wider field of Morris’s printed fabrics makes this attention to process especially revealing. ^{[14] [1]}

Why blue and yellow mattered to Morris

In Of Dyeing as an Art, published in Arts and Crafts Essays in 1893, Morris explained green as a combination of an indigo blue and a yellow dye. This gives a broader technical context for Cincinnati’s account of Evenlode’s green ground. The essay describes a family of working principles; it does not establish the exact substances or quantities used in every surviving length of Evenlode. ^[16]

Morris’s explanation of indigo also shows why a blue ground represented skilled preparation. Indigo was reduced to make it soluble; cloth worked in that solution acquired its blue as exposure to air oxidised the colour again. Repeating the treatment deepened the shade. He stressed the experience needed to manage the vat, countering any impression that a large, apparently uniform field was the easy part of a richly patterned fabric. ^[16]

Other dyes called for different treatment. Morris discussed mordants, substances used to help fix certain dyes to the fibre, and described how printed mordants could produce different colours when cloth subsequently entered a dye bath. This distinction adds another useful layer to the general idea of “printing”: what is applied by a block may prepare the fibre for colour to develop later. His essay helps explain the craft vocabulary surrounding Evenlode without supplying a substitute for its missing full workshop recipe. ^[16]

His preference for natural dyes was strongly aesthetic and polemical. He attacked commercial aniline colours, praised the appearance of older dye materials, and valued how their colours changed with age. Yet he acknowledged that natural dyes faded too, noting the vulnerability of yellow and the resulting alteration of greens. Present-day photographs and digitally enhanced reproductions therefore cannot establish Evenlode’s original palette. The reproduction lets us study relationships between dark ground, pale blossoms and coloured foliage; a claim about an individual curtain’s dyes or fading would require evidence specific to that object. ^{[16] [1]}

A drawing that lets us see the arrangement being worked out

The reproduced Evenlode design drawing offers a different encounter with the pattern. A broad, irregular strip of coloured ornament runs through the sheet, surrounded by lighter areas where plant outlines remain visible. A large pale flower near the upper centre contains a small branching motif inside its pointed centre. Lower down, a round red flower centre is crosshatched, while serrated blue leaves swing outward from the main growth. Small red letter annotations appear at the right. Their exact working meaning is not established by the reproduction. ^[17]

The contrast between coloured passages and pencilled outlines is particularly useful. It lets the eye move from a flower’s contour to the fuller effect of petals, internal markings and dark surrounding ground. At the edges, uncoloured shapes continue beyond the strongly painted portion. The composition can be considered through both its connected lines and its areas of colour. The sheet makes those two aspects easier to distinguish than the densely filled textile does. ^[17]

The file description identifies the drawing through Linda Parry’s edited William Morris of 1996, page 263, and lists pencil, pen and ink, chalk, watercolour and bodycolour. That identification comes through the reproduction’s documentation; the drawing has no confirmed accession in that record. Its visible correspondence with the fabric is valuable for studying the design, but cannot establish which surviving printed specimen was made from which particular working sheet. Readers interested in these decisions can explore the broader role of Morris’s drawings. ^[17]

From repeating design to household curtains

The William Morris Gallery holds two Evenlode curtains, F325a and F325b. Its records describe cotton with indigo discharge and block printing, measuring 77.5 × 91.4 centimetres per curtain. Both give the design’s registration date; neither supplies a precise manufacture date. The F325a account traces the pair to Miss Frances J. Lefroy, whose parents’ house was decorated by Morris & Co. in the 1890s. The Gallery acquired them in 1978 with grant assistance from the V&A. ^{[2] [4]}

Cincinnati’s separate piece, accession 1993.144, is printed cotton chintz, dated 1883–1900, measuring 127 × 168.5 centimetres. These are object dimensions, not competing measurements of the pattern repeat. ^[3]

The curtains and museum length bring different questions into view. A length makes it possible to follow growth across an extended surface; a curtain asks how that surface works when cut, hung and gathered. Both matter to the understanding of a furnishing design.

That household use brings the eye back to the design’s large flowers and travelling stems. Morris observed that printed cloth would fall into folds or turn around furniture, giving it different demands from flat wallpaper. A folded curtain interrupts the view: a flower disappears, a blue leaf catches attention, and a connected stem emerges on the next ridge. Evenlode’s large accents offer recognition amid those interruptions, while the smaller flowers reward a closer look. Its order can survive a partial view, leaving the cloth ample room to move. ^{[14] [1]}