Jasmine

In William Morris’s Jasmine, small cream flowers seem to float across a much heavier mass of leaves. Look again and their slender stems become visible, looping sideways, rising and crossing the broad foliage behind them. The wallpaper, first produced in 1872, brings two plants into one continuous field: hawthorn provides the underlying growth, with jasmine scrolling across it. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s surviving sample makes this layered construction especially clear. ^[1]

The pleasure lies in moving between those two scales. The little flowers give the eye places to settle, while the larger leaves carry it beyond any single blossom. Neither layer quite releases its hold. Among William Morris’s wallpapers, Jasmine rewards this kind of patient looking because its apparent abundance depends on a structure that is easier to feel than to isolate.

Two plants, two kinds of movement

In the Met sample, the broad, sharply lobed leaves make a cool grey-green network. Their long stems and pointed divisions create a succession of angles. Rounded clusters of small flowers interrupt that angular growth. Across it, the jasmine introduces smoother curves, narrow pointed leaves and cream blooms whose turning petals are picked out with brown lines. Some flowers face us; others turn sideways into little trumpets. These colours belong to this particular sheet; other versions change the balance. ^[1]

The distinction between the two plants is easiest to follow through their stems. The jasmine’s pale lines travel almost horizontally in places, then bend into long, loose loops. A stem can pass across a broad leaf without being lost in it. Behind these loops, the more upright arrangement gives the field weight. The Met describes this underlying movement as a disguised vertical meander: an up-and-down route that is broken and softened by the growth around it. ^[1]

Calling one layer the background does not make it incidental. Try looking only at the cream jasmine flowers and much of the wallpaper’s coherence disappears. Their spacing makes sense because the bigger leaf shapes fill the intervals, connect the clusters and prevent the flowers from becoming detached spots. Conversely, concentrating on the hawthorn alone misses the fine curves that interrupt its heavier rhythm. The effect comes from their relationship.

David Rodgers makes a useful comparison in his catalogue of the William Morris Society’s original designs. Both Scroll and Jasmine have complex underlying patterns with a swirling design laid over them. In Scroll, the underlying pattern had enough independence to be issued separately as Branch. Rodgers sees Jasmine as a more thoroughly integrated arrangement of its two layers. That distinction helps explain why it is difficult to mentally peel away the jasmine without changing the whole design. ^[2]

The plants also give the surface different kinds of line. There are outlines that define the edge of a leaf, finer marks that suggest its veins, and uninterrupted stems that carry the eye across several motifs. Their jobs differ, even where they use similar colours. Close inspection is therefore less a matter of counting flowers than of following how one kind of mark hands movement to another.

A repeat that invites looking without demanding to be solved

The repeated units of a wallpaper must join, but they need not advertise their joins. Jasmine’s long loops repeatedly carry attention away from the upright growth behind them. Flower clusters punctuate the surface without forming a single insistent row. On the Met sheet, the sideways movement of the pale stems makes it hard to keep following one vertical route for very long.

Morris later explained the problem in Some Hints on Pattern-Designing, a lecture delivered in 1881. A wallpaper remains flat against a wall; it cannot rely on the folds of a curtain to interrupt its geometry. He advised designers to conceal the construction sufficiently to discourage counting repeats, distribute the ornament evenly, and avoid accidental lines that become obtrusive across a wall. This is a useful way of looking at Jasmine, although the lecture came after the design and does not describe its making. ^[13]

His phrase “satisfying mystery” is particularly apt. A viewer can recognise that the leaves and stems obey an order without immediately finding a diagram beneath them. The idea does not require blurred or hesitant drawing. In the same lecture Morris insists on definite forms and firm outlines, with one element growing convincingly out of another. Jasmine offers plenty of crisp boundaries; the mystery arises from their combination. ^[13]

The design can consequently sustain different levels of attention. Seen from farther away, its leaf masses and dispersed blossoms hold together as a field. Closer to the surface, individual curves can be followed through crossings and interruptions. This change in how one looks matters for domestic decoration: a wall is encountered while moving, sitting, talking or attending to something else. Morris’s lecture places ornament in precisely that setting of everyday work and rest. ^[13]

The drawing came before Merton Abbey

The William Morris Society owns a design for Jasmine catalogued by Rodgers as D3, dated 1871–72. It is pencil and watercolour, measuring 90.3 by 64.1 centimetres. Rodgers also lists a related version in Birmingham, B410’41, and two further designs then in the Stanford Berger collection. These are separate surviving documents, rather than different names for the Met’s printed sheet. ^[2]

The Society drawing carries a stencil on its reverse reading “Jasmine 10. Merton Abbey.” It would be easy to mistake that address for the place and date of the design’s invention. Rodgers explains, however, that Merton Abbey stencils were applied later to most of the designs in the collection, after the move there in 1881. The stencil belongs to the drawing’s subsequent working life; it does not turn a design of 1871–72 into a new design of the 1880s. ^[2]

The distinction reveals something useful about the life of a pattern. An original sheet could remain part of a company’s resources after its first translation into wallpaper. Labels, numbers and addresses accumulated around a design that continued to be useful. A drawing preserves decisions in pencil and paint; a printed sample shows an arrangement realised in a particular set of colours. Neither object tells the entire story on its own.

For a revealing comparison, the surviving design for Chrysanthemum, dated 1877, exposes a pencil grid beneath its unfinished lower portion. The William Morris Gallery explains how that grid assisted the repetition and transfer of elements by hand. It is direct evidence of planning in that drawing. It also reminds us why natural-looking ornament can depend on careful construction, without proving that Jasmine was laid out by exactly the same method. ^[14]

Printed paper and the other Jasmine

The Met identifies its Jasmine sheet as block-printed in distemper colours, credits Morris as designer and Jeffrey & Co. as printer, and lists Morris & Company as manufacturer. These roles separate the invention of the pattern from the skilled production of the paper. Rodgers’s wider account identifies Barrett’s of Bethnal Green as the cutters of woodblocks used for Morris’s wallpapers, with Jeffrey carrying out the printing. ^{[1] [2]}

That division of work matters when looking at the fine stems and the intersections between the layers. The drawing had to become a printable arrangement. Morris’s later advice asks for flowers and leaves suited to a block, bringing the material means into the design from the beginning. The decisive quality is the clarity of the resulting shapes and their relationship across the surface. ^[13]

There is also an earlier Morris furnishing textile called Jasmine Trellis, dated 1868–70. The V&A discusses it among his first experiments in printed fabrics, explaining that its design was simplified to accommodate the palette of largely chemical dyes used by Clarkson. It is a separate design and product from the wallpaper introduced in 1872. Sharing the word Jasmine does not make the two interchangeable. ^[15]

Their technical histories must therefore remain separate too. The V&A’s account of textile production moves through Clarkson, Morris’s later work with Thomas Wardle, and the development of dyeing and printing at Merton Abbey. Those developments help explain his printed fabrics. They do not establish a dye recipe for Jeffrey’s Jasmine wallpaper. On paper, distemper colours form the printed decoration; on cloth, dyes and the behaviour of the textile present another set of problems. Morris himself treated paper and cotton as related crafts with different demands. ^{[13] [15]}

Colour changes the balance

The Met describes Jasmine’s palette as three greens with yellow and brown, and records another version with yellow leaves on a pale green ground. Within the illustrated sample, the contrast between cool broad foliage and warmer pale stems makes the upper layer easy to follow. The cream flowers are small, but their lightness gives them a stronger presence than their size alone would suggest. ^[1]

Later samples show how much room there was for variation. A Morris & Co. wallpaper pattern book at the William Morris Gallery, B46, is dated after 1917. Its Jasmine samples, numbers 28 and 29, preserve two different green arrangements. The catalogue describes yellow-greens, white, pinkish brown, pale green and dull pale blue in one; the other combines pale greens, white and light brown with a green ground and duck-egg blues. These are evidence of later commercial choices, several decades after the design’s introduction. ^[16]

Such changes affect which part of the pattern steps forward. A stronger contrast around the broad leaves can make the underlying growth more assertive; a lighter, more continuous jasmine stem can draw attention across it. The same network can therefore feel differently balanced without changing the identity of its plants or the path of its repeat. Reading a colourway means looking at relationships, including the spaces between leaves, as well as identifying individual hues.

An earlier commercial trace survives in the checklist for the 2018 Spanish exhibition William Morris y el movimiento Arts and Crafts en Gran Bretaña. It identifies an 1875 leaf from a wallpaper printing register containing number 71, Dark Jasmine, alongside Green Fruit and Blue Daisy. The entry establishes the recorded colour-name and its place in a dated register; the checklist alone cannot tell us the precise appearance of that dark version. ^[17]

B46 also places the wallpapers within a broader furnishing offer: its inside label promotes fabrics in appropriate colourings to accompany them. Jasmine was thus presented to customers through actual samples and relationships between materials, as well as through the pattern’s name. The surviving book preserves something a single reproduction cannot convey: a choice among colour arrangements within a range of furnishings. ^[16]

Looking from Jasmine to Pimpernel

Pimpernel, designed in 1876, offers a productive comparison. Its large flowers are tulips, punctuated by much smaller pimpernel flowers, according to the William Morris Gallery. As in Jasmine, the title names only part of the planting. A viewer who looks solely for the named flower misses the larger forms that organise the surface. ^[3]

The comparison makes Jasmine’s particular balance easier to appreciate. Here the small pale blossoms are carried across an extensive leaf network, so that lightness and weight remain in play together. Follow one jasmine stem until it bends out of the way, then return to the lobed leaf behind it. The foreground becomes clearer without reducing the underlying growth to empty background. That exchange between two kinds of plant is where the design keeps its movement.