Larkspur

Broad leaves sweep through William Morris’s Larkspur like fans opening in different directions. Between them sit rounded, many-petalled flowers, smaller blossoms and branching sprays. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s pale yellow example, the whole arrangement shares one colour against a white ground: the eye follows the changing shapes and the light channels between them before it begins to separate individual plants. This is a block-printed wallpaper, whose apparently abundant growth depends on a carefully recurring structure. ^[1]

Larkspur also rewards looking beyond a single familiar reproduction. It existed in monochrome and multicoloured versions, and the design crossed from paper into printed and woven cloth. The William Morris Gallery distinguishes a monochrome version of 1872 from a polychrome version of 1874. A surviving related drawing even contains a different flower from the finished wallpaper. These differences reveal a pattern developed through choices, revisions and changes of material. ^{[2] [3]}

Its history brings several kinds of skilled work into view. Morris designed the pattern; specialist block cutters and wallpaper printers translated it into a repeatable surface. A working drawing and a surviving wooden block connect the printed leaves to the decisions and tools that made them possible. ^{[1] [3]}

Why Larkspur has more than one date

The dates attached to Larkspur need to be read with their particular sources. David Rodgers’s catalogue of the William Morris Society’s designs dates its related drawing, D1, to 1871–72, and states that the wallpaper was issued in monochrome in 1872 and polychrome in 1874. The William Morris Gallery gives the same distinction between the two versions. Their chronology distinguishes the development of the pattern from the introduction of its richer colouring. ^{[2] [3]}

The Victoria and Albert Museum’s grey-on-pale-ground wallpaper, E.468-1919, has separate catalogue fields for “designed”, 1874, and “published”, 1875. Its historical note also says that Larkspur was first issued as a monochrome paper. The Met dates its yellow example to 1875 and goes further in its accompanying explanation, saying that the pattern was first produced that year. That last statement does not agree with the earlier issue chronology supplied by Rodgers and the Gallery. The records therefore do not yield one universally agreed first-production date. ^{[4] [1]}

Rodgers places Larkspur alongside Scroll and Jasmine in Morris’s renewed work on original wallpapers in the early 1870s. His account emphasises the greater complexity of their organic patterns compared with the earliest papers. This is a helpful setting for Larkspur: its interest lies in the relationships among large and small forms, as much as in the identity of any one flower. ^[3]

Following the leaves across the paper

The Met’s yellow-and-white sheet makes those relationships particularly easy to study. Large leaves bend and spread, their narrow white internal divisions echoing the long curves of their outer edges. Smaller pointed leaves branch into the spaces around them. Rounded flowers provide compact centres among these directional forms, while clusters of little blossoms introduce a different scale. The pale ground remains visible as an active network, separating and connecting the yellow shapes. ^[1]

There is no single bouquet with an empty space around it. A leaf leading towards one edge is answered by another elsewhere; a rounded flower interrupts a passage of sweeping foliage; small sprays occupy gaps that might otherwise break the continuity. The arrangement gives the eye several paths through the sheet. Its alternation of broad shapes and fine growth lets the pattern remain busy without making every part equally emphatic. The Met specimen’s restricted palette brings the pattern’s silhouette into unusual prominence. ^[1]

Morris’s later lecture Some Hints on Pattern-Designing, delivered in 1881, offers a useful way to think about this effect. He argues that wallpaper should distribute ornament evenly over the ground and disguise its construction sufficiently to discourage the viewer from counting repeats. He also warns that repeated elements can accidentally create conspicuous lines across a wall. These are practical problems of a surface seen continuously in a room, where a small arrangement will recur many times. ^[15]

The lecture postdates Larkspur, so it is evidence of Morris’s stated principles, rather than a contemporary explanation of this particular design. Yet its distinction between a living impression of growth and an over-obvious geometrical framework helps explain the pleasure of following these leaves. The repeated pattern can be found, but the forms continually offer another direction to look. The broader wallpaper designs explore this balancing of order with variety through very different arrangements of plants. ^[15]

A thistle becomes a larkspur

The Society’s related drawing preserves a revealing change. Rodgers describes D1 as pencil and black watercolour on an irregular sheet measuring 36 by 47 centimetres. It corresponds to the printed design except for a thistle replaced by a larkspur. The William Morris Gallery likewise describes a rose, thistle and leafy branch in the related design, with the substitution made in the finished wallpaper. The finished title therefore conceals a small history of revision. ^{[3] [2]}

A particular plant could be replaced while the surrounding scheme continued to develop. The sources do not explain Morris’s reason for the substitution, but the change reveals the flexibility of his botanical vocabulary. The flowers were choices within an arrangement; their recognition as plants went together with their usefulness as ornament. ^{[2] [3]}

In the pattern-design lecture, Morris insists on clear outlines and a convincing sense that one part grows from another. He describes beginning with an overall conception before drawing individual leaves, flowers and thorns. The revised flower in Larkspur can be considered alongside that argument, without assuming that the later lecture records the precise sequence of this drawing’s creation. Recognisable plants supplied forms that could be selected and organised to serve the whole surface. ^[15]

The back of D1 adds another layer of history. Rodgers records a stencil naming Larkspur and Merton Abbey, and explains that the Merton Abbey stencils on these drawings were applied after the move from Queen Square in 1881. The stencil belongs to the drawing’s later working life; it does not make the original design an invention of the 1880s. A sheet could remain useful to a business long after its first preparation. This is one of the ways Morris’s drawings preserve both a creative decision and the practical history of its reuse. ^[3]

The hands between drawing and wallpaper

A surviving Larkspur printing block at the William Morris Gallery makes one stage of production tangible. Catalogue number R253 is carved pearwood, with Barrett’s of Bethnal Green Road named as its manufacturer and Morris & Co. as retailer. The Gallery identifies it as a block used to print the wallpaper pattern. Here the translation of an ornamental line into a printable object has a material and a named maker. ^[5]

Rodgers describes Barrett’s block cutting and Jeffrey & Co.’s printing as the established production arrangement for Morris’s own wallpapers. The Met’s Larkspur record names Jeffrey & Co. as printer, while the V&A calls Jeffrey the manufacturer and Morris & Co. the publisher. Taken together, these records give a chain of responsibilities: Morris devised the design, Barrett’s supplied carved printing equipment, and Jeffrey produced wallpaper for the firm. Calling the pattern “by William Morris” need not obscure those other kinds of expertise. ^{[3] [1] [4]}

The material matters to the appearance. Both the Met and V&A describe their papers as block-printed in distemper colours. Morris’s lecture asks designers to make flowers and leaves suitable for printing with a block, treating the requirements of a craft as part of the invention. In the yellow Larkspur, the firm silhouettes and clear channels through the leaves offer a visible way into that argument. Their clarity remains legible even when the shapes share a single hue. ^{[1] [4] [15]}

R253 measures 5.5 by 56 by 47.5 centimetres. Those are the dimensions of a surviving block, not an established measurement of the full pattern repeat. Its record supplies neither a manufacture date nor a complete inventory of all the blocks used for the design. The block preserves one part of a larger production process: a specialist craft translated the design into a tool that another workshop could use. ^[5]

How colour changes what comes forward

The Met explains that Larkspur was available in light blue, grey and brick red as well as the yellow printed over white in its own example. It also describes a multicoloured variation with blue and pink blossoms and leaves in two greens. The change has consequences beyond atmosphere. Separate flower colours can draw attention to the blossoms as individual accents, while distinct greens can make divisions within the foliage more apparent. In a monochrome version, differences of scale, contour and spacing carry more of that work. ^[1]

This helps explain why the pale yellow example should be looked at on its own terms. The white channels between leaf segments and around flower petals are especially important when colour does not distinguish one plant from another. What may appear at first to be a gentle, uniform field resolves into several kinds of growth. Monochrome printing offers a close view of how much variety is already built into the drawing. ^[1]

Later production also preserved several colour options. The William Morris Gallery’s Sanderson & Sons pattern book B89 records the hand-printed Morris Collection of 1964. Its four Larkspur entries include light grey-blue, yellow and grey on white, and red on burnt orange. These are documented offerings in a twentieth-century sample book; the design date printed beside them does not turn the physical samples into Victorian sheets. ^[16]

The Gallery’s separate Larkspur specimen B11c was manufactured by Arthur Sanderson & Sons and presented by the company in 1950. It is another reminder that a design’s continuing availability and the age of a particular piece of wallpaper are different questions. The design continued through a longer manufacturing history, during which makers and colour selections could change. ^[2]

From a flat wall to folded cloth

Larkspur also crossed material boundaries. Rodgers dates a printed chintz from the design to 1875 and a silk damask to 1876; the Gallery confirms its use for chintz and woven damask. The V&A adds the more precise documentary detail that a single-colour version was registered as a printed textile in April 1875. This registration concerns the textile version and should not be substituted for the earlier wallpaper chronology. ^{[3] [2] [4]}

These applications require different descriptions even when the name remains the same. Printed paper receives its pattern on a sheet; a printed textile carries decoration on cloth; in a damask, the pattern is woven. A shared ornamental scheme does not make these interchangeable objects. Nor do the records cited here establish that every colour arrangement or every detail passed unchanged from one material to the next. ^{[1] [3] [4]}

Morris himself drew attention to the difference between paper fixed flat to a wall and cloth falling into folds or turning around furniture. In the latter, he allowed greater freedom to reveal the construction of a pattern, since folds and the material’s appearance contribute their own changing effects. For figured woven fabrics he advocated bolder design, clear detail and intricate relationships among the parts. ^[15]

Larkspur’s paper, chintz and damask versions give those distinctions a particular historical setting. The same family of leaves and flowers entered several kinds of furnishing, but each posed a fresh problem of surface, structure and use. Following that passage into textiles extends the design’s story beyond its flowers: the wall holds the pattern continuously before the eye, while cloth brings it into the changing light and broken planes of a furnished room. ^{[3] [15]}