Hyacinth by John Henry Dearle

Pale, deeply cut leaves sweep across a pink ground in Hyacinth, accompanied by blue hanging flowers, small round blossoms and sprays of red and cream. Their stems form a connected framework: the eye can follow a rising curve, turn with a leaf and discover another flower beyond it. John Henry Dearle designed this wallpaper for Morris & Co. The William Morris Gallery dates the design to about 1900–12, placing it after William Morris’s death in 1896. Its place in the Morris tradition belongs to the continuing work of the firm and to Dearle’s own authorship. ^{[1] [2]}

A surviving sheet in the Brooklyn Museum’s Wallpaper Sample Book 1, dated 1915–17, offers a particularly useful view of the pattern. This is Hyacinth, pattern 480, on page 29 of the book, a period commercial specimen with a dusty pink background. The photograph preserves the turned edge of the book above the printed sheet, reminding us that this abundance of flowers was once something a customer could examine and order. ^[3]

The design rewards two kinds of looking. At close range, its attraction lies in the variety of petals, leaf divisions and coloured outlines. Step back mentally, and those individual forms become the means of carrying a repeat across a wall. Understanding how Dearle joins them also helps explain how his work could sustain the identity of Morris & Co. while retaining a character of its own.

A garden built from different shapes

The Brooklyn sheet contains several distinct families of forms. Across its left side, broad leaves have rounded lobes, sharp inward cuts and pale lines dividing their surfaces. Their light green bodies are edged with cream and a darker outline, so the leaves remain legible against the rose-coloured ground. Some curve upwards, others fold downwards, and several turn back towards their stems. This variation makes the foliage seem active without requiring the shading of a naturalistic painting. ^[3]

The flowers create a different set of rhythms. At the lower left, blue and cream hanging blooms have long ribs that follow their swelling forms. Nearby are small cream flowers with round centres and short, evenly spaced petals. To the right, a spray of red flowers rises from a fan of narrow leaves. Pale centres and borders give these red forms an internal sparkle; their pointed tips answer the sharper divisions of the large foliage. Above them, finer green shoots branch across an open area of pink. ^[3]

These contrasts matter more than a confident botanical name for every detail. The Victoria and Albert Museum describes its own Hyacinth specimen as a formal arrangement of varied plants, with blue, red and white flowers, green foliage and a pink background. The title supplies a name for the design; it does not turn the whole composition into a botanical illustration of one species. Dearle brings unlike floral shapes into a common decorative language through their outlines, shared colours and connected movement. ^[13]

The pink is especially important. It appears between the small background leaves, around the flowerheads and in the larger spaces left by the principal stems. Those openings let the different forms keep their identities. Cover the gaps imaginatively and the red spray would lose its isolation, while the broad leaves would become harder to follow. Here the background participates in the drawing: a tapering piece of pink can be as effective in defining a leaf as the line printed around its edge.

The curve that holds the pattern together

The William Morris Gallery identifies the ogee as a characteristic part of Hyacinth’s construction. An ogee combines curves that turn in opposing directions, producing an elongated S-like movement. In this wallpaper, such turns connect the repeat through the growth of the plants. The structure can be followed in the swelling main stems, the narrowing intervals between them and the foliage that branches into the spaces they enclose. ^[1]

In the Brooklyn sheet, the broad stem entering from the left bends around the flowers and sends a pale branch towards the centre. The finely drawn green growth moves on a smaller scale behind it. This pairing prevents the large curves from standing alone as an obvious geometric diagram. The main foliage establishes a broad rhythm; the subordinate shoots keep the spaces within that rhythm occupied. Clear outlines allow both levels to remain readable even where the design becomes crowded. ^[3]

Morris’s lecture Some Hints on Pattern-Designing provides a useful way to think about this problem. In the published report of his 1881 talk, he argues for firm contours and growth that visibly connects one element to another. His discussion of wallpaper asks designers to occupy the ground evenly while concealing enough of the construction to keep viewers from merely counting repeats. These are principles for the medium, rather than a description of this later Dearle design. ^[14]

Look at Hyacinth with those questions in mind and its balance becomes clearer. The eye can trace a stem, but flowers and leaves repeatedly interrupt that journey. The strongly drawn red spray offers a point of attention, then the blue blooms draw the eye away again. There is order enough to make the arrangement coherent and enough variation of size and direction to delay the recognition of its underlying framework. That tension between readable growth and a partly concealed structure is central to its effect as wallpaper.

Dearle’s place inside the firm

Dearle learned his craft inside Morris & Co. Lesley Baker’s study records that he entered the firm in 1878 and worked in its glass-painting room, where his employment also gave him an opportunity to study drawing and design. He trained within an enterprise that moved between several decorative crafts. Baker argues that his work continued the company’s established style while also showing individual qualities. ^[2]

The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society catalogues give a concrete glimpse of this range. The Furniture History Society’s catalogue index records Dearle’s credit for the background of a St Cecilia tapestry in 1888, alongside a figure after Edward Burne-Jones and execution by John Sleath. By 1899 it lists two wallpaper panels under exhibition number 198 and seven under number 464, both explicitly credited to Dearle as designer. These entries establish public recognition of his wallpaper work before the date range assigned to Hyacinth. They do not identify those exhibited panels as this particular pattern. ^[15]

Such credits help recover the different jobs inside a product carrying the company name. Designing a background, supplying a figure, weaving a tapestry and retailing the completed work could involve different people. For wallpaper, too, the designer’s name and the firm’s name answer different questions. “Morris & Co.” locates Hyacinth within a business and its range; “John Henry Dearle” identifies the person credited with conceiving the pattern. Calling it a William Morris design would erase that distinction.

Baker also explains how the commercial value of the founder’s reputation could overshadow Dearle’s contributions in catalogues. In the company’s 1905 reorganisation, Henry Currie Marillier became managing director and Dearle artistic director. Baker challenges a simple account of decline after Morris, pointing out that adaptation and reuse had belonged to the firm’s practice during his lifetime as well. Her argument encourages us to assess Hyacinth through the decisions visible in the pattern: the contrasting scales of foliage, the curves that connect its parts and the distribution of colour. ^[2]

From a sample book to a customer’s wall

The William Morris Gallery holds another important piece of commercial evidence: a Morris & Co. wallpaper pattern book catalogued about 1913–17. Entry 39 names Hyacinth, number 480, and credits Dearle. Its recorded colours include pale greens, an olive outline, turquoise, yellow and rose on dusty pink. The same book offers several versions of his Blackberry, alongside designs by William and May Morris. It places different designers and generations together within one range. ^[16]

The cover’s ordering instructions illuminate how that range worked. Customers were to quote the pattern’s name and number, and the samples were to remain intact. Larger examples could be requested; papers requiring printing to order were subject to a quotation based on quantity. The book therefore offered both a visual choice and a system for turning that choice into a sale. Number 480 connected a customer’s response to the flowers with the practical identification of a product. ^[16]

The Brooklyn sheet adds the experience of viewing such a sample. Its edges cut through leaves, flowers and stems, and the book’s upper leaf curls over the printed area. The design extends beyond the piece of paper available to inspect. A customer had to imagine those partial forms continuing, and the larger arrangement recurring beside and above the sample. The isolated sheet allows unusually close attention to detail, but a finished wall would bring repetition into the encounter. ^[3]

That distinction also explains why measurements require care. The Gallery gives a repeat of 49.5 × 53.3 cm for Hyacinth, while its surviving B101 specimen measures 182.9 × 55.9 cm. The repeat describes the returning design unit; the larger dimensions describe the retained piece of wallpaper. They are useful for different purposes. One helps explain rhythm and scale, while the other tells us about the particular museum object that survives. ^[1]

Printing the design in another generation

The Gallery’s B101 is a later object than either the design or the period pattern books. Arthur Sanderson & Sons printed it in 1968 from original Morris & Co. blocks, which Sanderson had acquired when the firm closed in 1940. The Gallery identifies its technique as block printing in distemper. Its reverse carries the Sanderson colourway number 138620 and a price of 122 shillings. Those details belong to this twentieth-century printing and its commercial setting. ^[1]

At the V&A, accession E.1416-1979 represents another printing: one of a group of Morris & Co. reprints made by Sanderson about 1955. The museum separately credits Dearle as designer, Morris & Co. as publisher and Sanderson as printer. Its date is evidence for the manufacture of that sheet, rather than a competing date for the invention of Hyacinth. ^[13]

Together, these objects reveal a design passing between generations of manufacture. A pattern could remain available through the survival and reuse of its physical printing equipment. Yet the object in front of a viewer still has its own date, palette and history. The 1968 inscription cannot supply the price of the paper when Dearle designed it, and the dusty pink period sample cannot identify every later colourway. Keeping these moments distinct makes the history richer: we can ask both how the design began and how people continued to encounter it.

Two ways of arranging abundance

Comparing Hyacinth with Dearle’s Blackberry brings its density into focus. Brooklyn’s page 21, a Blackberry specimen from the same 1915–17 sample book, has branching thorny stems, green leaflets and pink flowers against a much more open pale ground. Large intervals let the branches stand apart. The small blossoms gather around the stems, while the direction of the growth can be followed across relatively uncluttered spaces. ^[17]

In Hyacinth, the broad pale leaves carry much more visual weight. Smaller green shoots enter the intervals between the principal plants, and the alternating red and blue flowers establish additional points of attention. The two patterns share an interest in directed growth and clear contours, but they distribute their activity differently. Blackberry makes the open ground conspicuous; Hyacinth sets larger forms and smaller growth into a closer conversation. ^{[3] [17]}

This is easiest to see by returning to the pink opening above Hyacinth’s red spray. Fine green leaves climb through it, while pale lobed foliage presses in from either side. The gap never becomes empty, yet it remains distinct from the heavier forms around it. Follow it upwards and the composition opens; follow the cream-edged branch sideways and it closes again. Dearle makes changes in density part of the pleasure of looking, giving the eye several routes through the same connected garden. ^[3]