Printed Fabrics

A length of Strawberry Thief began by becoming blue. Cloth was washed and immersed in indigo, then dried before a printer applied a bleaching agent with wooden blocks. The pale pattern emerged through the removal of colour; further operations introduced other colours. The Huntington's account of this process gives the familiar birds and flowers a different kind of interest. Their appearance depended on an ordered succession of treatments, with washing and preparation between stages. ^[1]

Cotton was central to William Morris's printed furnishings, but linen also carried his patterns. The William Morris Gallery's Tulip and Willow is linen, printed after 1883 from a design made in 1873. Those dates matter: a pattern could remain in production while its materials and colouring changed. The surviving cloth records a particular version of the design's life. ^[2]

Printed fabrics form one branch of Morris's textiles, alongside woven furnishings, embroidery, carpets and tapestry. Here the pattern is applied to cloth that has already been woven. To understand these fabrics, it helps to follow both the drawing and the cloth: how the repeat was organised, how its colours were obtained and how the finished material would hang or wrap around furniture.

Clarkson's early prints and an unsatisfactory blue

Morris's company entered printed-fabric production through experiments with an existing decorative tradition. In 1868 its first prints copied white-ground chintzes of the 1830s. Clarkson's in Lancashire produced them with blocks, rather than rollers. The V&A describes these trials as preparation for Morris's first original textile design, Jasmine Trellis, made in 1868–70. Its arrangement had to be simplified to accommodate the palette of Clarkson's mostly chemical dyes. The available manufacturing process was already influencing what could appear on the cloth. ^[3]

Tulip and Willow, designed in 1873, belongs to the next stage of that investigation. The Gallery records its first block printing at Clarkson's with aniline dyes. The V&A singles out Morris's disappointment with the crude effect of Prussian blue. Aniline dyes and Prussian blue were different forms of commercial colour; neither term means indigo. The two accounts identify problems Morris encountered while seeking a more satisfying palette. ^{[2] [3]}

A later specimen can therefore be misleading if its production history is ignored. The Gallery's linen, catalogue number F3, is identified as indigo-discharge and block-printed, with manufacture after 1883 at Merton Abbey. Its design date does not make it evidence of what Clarkson's printed in 1873. The same named pattern links two periods, but the later cloth embodies a different approach to colour. ^[2]

That distinction also changes the larger story. Morris did not begin with a fully established range of naturally dyed prints. His preferred methods emerged through dissatisfaction, collaboration and experiment. The continuity lay partly in the design; its translation into a furnishing remained open to revision. ^{[2] [3]}

Learning with Thomas Wardle

In 1875 Morris began working with Thomas Wardle, who owned a dyeing works at Leek in Staffordshire. Their work sought to re-establish natural-dye processes, and the V&A identifies Marigold of 1875 as the first textile likely to have been printed by Wardle. The word ‘likely’ leaves room for uncertainty about the exact sequence of the early prints. ^[3]

Wardle brought the resources and knowledge of a specialist manufacturer. The Huntington's Snakeshead, catalogued about 1876, credits Morris as designer and Thomas Wardle of Leek as manufacturer. The division of work is explicit. A Morris pattern could be the product of another firm's printing and dyeing expertise, sold within the decorative enterprise that carried his name. ^[6]

Snakeshead provides a bridge between the early Clarkson trials and the later Merton fabrics. It belongs to a period when Morris was developing a substantial printed range while relying on outside contractors for commercial quantities. Familiar garden flowers supplied much of the subject matter, but the practical problem was how to make their forms and colours convincing through a repeatable manufacturing process. Increasing demand, particularly after the Oxford Street shop opened in 1877, made that problem more pressing. ^[3]

Merton Abbey: water, space and skilled workers

Morris found the room for that development at Merton Abbey in 1881. The former textile-printing works near Wimbledon offered the River Wandle's soft water and extensive grounds for washing and drying cloth. It also allowed large indigo vats to be installed. The V&A connects these facilities directly with his search for a satisfactory blue. A dyeing process needed a suitable physical setting as well as a formula. ^[3]

The Merton Priory Trust describes dyeing in large sunken vats, with block printing carried out on long padded tables. The length of a furnishing fabric had to pass through several kinds of work, from immersion and washing to carefully positioned impressions and drying. Space was an active part of production: the printer needed a supported length of cloth, while the dyer needed vessels and water appropriate to the work. ^[7]

David Saxby's study identifies the people who supplied these skills. Samuel Goodacre was the dye-house foreman; Thomas Kenyon worked as a colour mixer. William Hillier and Henry and George Hill were block printers. Naming them makes the relationship between designer and manufacture more precise. Morris's involvement and technical curiosity did not remove the need for experienced workers with distinct responsibilities. ^[8]

Saxby also records a steam boiler serving the dye vats and a washing machine, described as a washing jenny, used to rinse printed cottons. Hand block printing therefore coexisted with equipment supporting other operations. The method of applying the pattern tells us something specific about manufacture; it does not describe every action in the works. ^[8]

Merton brought important processes together, but Morris & Co. continued to draw on production elsewhere. Wallpaper, for example, was printed by Jeffrey & Co., not in the Merton fabric workshop. Similar-looking flowers on paper and cloth could have different makers, materials and technical histories. ^[7]

What indigo, mordants, resists and discharges do

In his 1893 essay “Of Dyeing as an Art,” Morris explains why indigo demands more than stirring blue colour into water. It must first be reduced, making it soluble. Cloth is worked in that prepared vat; exposure to air then oxidises the indigo, restoring its insoluble blue form. Repeated dipping builds the desired shade. Morris stresses the experience needed to establish and manage the vat successfully. His account gives technical substance to the blue that had proved so difficult in his earlier prints. ^[9]

Other colours require a different relationship with the fibre. Morris describes madder red and weld yellow as mordant dyes. A mordant prepares the material so that the dye forms a durable colour on it. In printing, this preparation can itself be applied in a pattern. The cloth may subsequently enter a dye bath as a whole, yet the treated areas respond differently from the untreated ground. ^[9]

This means that a block need not carry the finished visible colour. It might carry a substance whose effect becomes apparent only after a later treatment. Morris's discussion of printed cotton explains how different strengths and compositions of mordant can produce different results in the same madder bath. Washing and clearing then remove unwanted colouring from the surrounding areas. A simple account of coloured blocks stamped onto white fabric misses these intermediate chemical decisions. ^[9]

Resist and discharge describe two further operations. A resist protects an area against a subsequent application of dye. A discharge removes colour already present. Cincinnati Art Museum's account of Evenlode distinguishes both from printing dye onto the fabric. The order is crucial: keeping colour out and lifting colour away may produce related visual effects, but they act at different points in the cloth's treatment. ^[10]

Morris's essay is also an argument about the ends of this knowledge. He praises the scientific achievement behind aniline dyes while condemning the commercial pursuit of cheap colour at the expense of beauty. That outspoken position belongs to 1893, after years of practical investigation. Read beside the Clarkson trials, it records a developed conviction rather than a principle that had governed every fabric from the outset. ^[9]

Keeping the blocks in register

Chemical preparation and precise printing had to work together. At Merton, the printer charged a block from a dye pad and pressed it onto cloth supported by a padded table, using a weighted mallet. The dye pads travelled on trolleys alongside the work. After one set of impressions dried, another set of blocks could be applied. The Merton Priory Trust describes small projecting pins that helped align successive impressions. ^[7]

This alignment is called registration. It joins one impression to the next along the cloth and positions later impressions in relation to earlier ones. A pattern containing several operations must preserve their relationship over an entire length. The work combines repeated action with continual attention: a misplaced impression can interrupt the intended continuity or put a colour where it does not belong. ^[7]

May Morris's recollection, reproduced by Saxby, draws attention to precisely this deliberate progress across the stretched material and the careful registration of joins. Her account connects the price of elaborate chintzes with work that customers could have watched in the printing shed. It is retrospective testimony, but it usefully identifies the labour concealed by a finished, apparently effortless repeat. ^[8]

The number of blocks belongs to the particular pattern and process. It cannot safely be inferred from the number of visible colours: blocks may apply resists, mordants or discharges as well as dye. Cincinnati's count for Evenlode is specific evidence, rather than a standard figure to attach to every Morris furnishing. ^[10]

Strawberry Thief: several days in the making

Designed in 1883, Strawberry Thief became one of the firm's best-known cotton furnishings. The William Morris Gallery names indigo, alizarin red and weld yellow in its production, explaining that the process took several days and made it one of the firm's most expensive cottons. It nevertheless remained popular. Complexity had both a visible result and a commercial consequence. ^[4]

The Huntington's label gives a more detailed sequence. After the indigo ground had been discharged with blocks, cloth requiring yellow was washed, partly dried, warmed and printed with a mordant in the appropriate places. A weld bath supplied the yellow; further preparation and dyeing introduced madder red, with additional details block-printed. This is the Huntington's account of the pattern's manufacture, not a recipe to transfer unchanged to other fabrics. ^[1]

The Gallery's identification of alizarin red and the Huntington's description of a madder stage should also remain attributed to their respective sources. Neither account is a chemical examination of every surviving length. The secure shared point is that obtaining the completed palette required successive, coordinated operations. Calling the fabric discharge-printed does not mean every visible colour was produced by removing blue. ^{[1] [4]}

Survival adds another complication. The Huntington dates its cotton sample about 1883, whereas Cleveland Museum of Art dates its plain-weave cotton Strawberry Thief about 1936. The latter preserves the design in a substantially later printing. An 1883 design date, a twentieth-century piece of cloth and a museum acquisition number answer different historical questions. ^{[1] [11]}

Evenlode: building a green ground

Evenlode shows why the indigo process should not be reduced to white flowers against blue. Cincinnati Art Museum states that its printing required thirty-three blocks. The dark-green background was obtained by dyeing the cloth blue and overprinting it with a strong yellow, while the floral pattern combined resists, printed dye and discharges. Green was thus built through successive colour operations, and the blocks performed several different jobs. ^[10]

The pattern's sources also complicate an exclusively English reading of Morris's flowers. Cincinnati connects it with Persian and seventeenth-century Italian velvets. The William Morris Gallery identifies an Italian cut velvet acquired in 1883 for the South Kensington Museum, where Morris advised on purchases. An older textile offered a way of arranging ornament that could be reconsidered in printed cotton. The model's material and the new furnishing's material were different. ^{[10] [12]}

The Gallery records the design's registration on 2 September 1883. Its own cotton example, F325a, is one of a pair of curtains from Miss Frances J. Lefroy, whose parents' house was decorated by Morris & Co. in the 1890s. The curtain supplies evidence of an actual furnishing context, later than registration. Its measurements describe the surviving curtain, not the dimensions of the repeating unit. ^[12]

Wandle: a large repeat with an Italian ancestor

Designed in 1884, Wandle takes scale further. The V&A gives its repeat as 98.4 by 44.5 centimetres and calls it the largest Morris attempted. The Gallery's cotton specimen F50 measures 98.4 by 96.5 centimetres. These figures describe different things: the unit that recurs and a particular piece of fabric. The shared first measurement does not make the second interchangeable. ^{[3] [5]}

The V&A traces the design's winding organisation to a sixteenth-century Italian brocaded velvet, museum number 442A-1883. Morris used its vine and rhythm as a foundation, replacing crowns with large stylised chrysanthemum heads. Historical borrowing here involved the arrangement of the surface as well as individual motifs. A velvet could supply the structure for a pattern eventually made through indigo discharge and block printing on cotton. ^{[5] [13]}

The river name adds another association. Sarah Mead Leonard places the tributary-named fabrics within Morris's response to the rural Thames and its surroundings, while acknowledging the historic textiles behind their meandering forms. Her interpretation treats the patterns as evocations of landscape, rather than literal pictures of a single place. An Italian source and an English river association can therefore coexist without requiring the stems to trace a geographical map. ^[14]

For a furnishing, the large repeat also means that a small sample can reveal only part of the organisation. A fragment may preserve a flower or a turning stem without showing how that element returns across a longer length. Repeat dimensions help restore the relationship between the detail held in a collection and the greater expanse for which the design was made.

Colour and pattern in a furnished room

Morris's 1881 lecture “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing” explains an important difference between printed cloth and wallpaper. Fabric commonly falls into folds or turns around furniture, giving its pattern a changing presentation. He therefore allows it a more openly visible construction and brighter colour than he recommends for paper stretched flat on a wall. His argument starts with the intended use of the material. ^[15]

That difference is easy to lose when a fabric is reproduced as a flat rectangle. A curtain reveals and conceals portions of the repeat; folds introduce actual shadows and alter the interval between visible motifs. These are effects supplied by the furnishing itself. The designer does not have to manufacture all the apparent depth within the drawing. The Lefroy Evenlode curtains offer a concrete reminder that this was cloth intended for use, beyond the flat surface of a museum sample. ^{[12] [15]}

In “Textiles,” published in 1893, Morris argues for large patterns whose structure remains clear while their details provide variety. He considers well-managed contrast more important than smallness in creating a restful effect. He also values hatching and dotting as opportunities especially suited to block printing. Rich detail and broad organisation could support one another: fine marks reward nearby attention, while the larger repeat establishes the fabric's movement across a room. These are Morris's artistic recommendations, grounded in his view of the medium. ^[16]

The cost of detail mattered to him too. In the 1881 lecture he insists that every added process on inexpensive cotton should contribute sufficient beauty to justify its labour. This offers a useful way of judging the elaborate Merton prints. The question is what the successive operations contribute to the cloth: a clearer contour, a richer interval of colour or a more persuasive relation between flower and ground. Technical difficulty alone was no guarantee of a worthwhile furnishing. ^[15]

Colour then continued to change in use. Morris's dyeing essay discusses appearance under artificial light and openly acknowledges that natural dyes fade. He preferred the changes he observed in older textiles, judging them more agreeable than the deterioration of the commercial colours he opposed. That preference is an aesthetic position, not a promise that his fabrics would remain unchanged. A printed furnishing belonged to the light, folds and passing years of its room as well as to the table where its pattern was made. ^[9]