Prints and Reproductions

A print can carry more than one date. In the William Morris Gallery's copy of A Note by William Morris on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press, published in 1898, the frontispiece was already several decades old as a design and a carved block. Edward Burne-Jones designed Psyche borne off by Zephyrus for a projected illustrated edition of The Earthly Paradise in the 1860s; Morris cut the image in wood. The earlier illustrated book was abandoned, but the block eventually found a place in this account of the Press, issued after Morris's death. Its history involves an illustrator, an engraver, an unrealised publication and a later use of the same printing surface. ^[1]

“William Morris prints” can also mean the patterned wallpapers and furnishing fabrics produced by his firm, or later reproductions of those designs. The first were practical printed materials, made to extend across walls or lengths of cloth. Book illustrations had another setting, among type, initials and borders. A reproduction made much later may preserve a recognisable pattern while changing its scale, colour or material. These are different ways of meeting Morris's work, and each rewards a different kind of attention. ^{[2] [3]}

The useful starting point is to ask what was designed to be printed, who turned the design into a printing surface, and when the particular impression was made. Morris himself insisted that design began with knowledge of its intended medium. In his 1881 lecture Some Hints on Pattern-Designing, wallpaper, cotton and woven cloth presented distinct problems, even when all carried flowers and foliage. A shared motif did not make their manufacture interchangeable. ^[4]

A pattern designed for repeated impressions

For wallpaper, the relationship between one unit and the next mattered as much as any individual flower. Morris wanted the underlying construction sufficiently concealed that the eye would not simply count the repeats. He also warned against accidental lines that became conspicuous when a pattern spread over a wall. The designer therefore had to think beyond the attractive drawing on the table: an isolated section could succeed while its repeated arrangement produced an unwelcome stripe. His description of this work makes repetition an active part of design. ^[4]

The Gallery's 1877 drawing for Chrysanthemum helps explain the preparation involved. Catalogued as pencil and watercolour on paper, A33 is a design rather than a printed wallpaper specimen. The Gallery describes the unfinished lower portion as revealing pencil work over a grid, which helped Morris repeat and transfer elements by hand. Drawing established relationships that a printer could subsequently reproduce; the drawing itself was not the product used to paper a room. ^[6]

Cutting the blocks was another skilled job. A surviving pearwood block for Larkspur, R253, is catalogued by the Gallery with Barrett's of Bethnal Green Road as manufacturer and Morris & Co. as retailer. That record gives a specific maker to an object easily absorbed into the broad phrase “a Morris block”. It does not establish that Morris personally carved it, nor does one surviving block reveal how many blocks a complete printing set contained. ^[7]

The V&A identifies Jeffrey & Co. as the printer or manufacturer of many Morris wallpapers. A multicoloured pattern required the contributions of successive blocks to come together across the paper; increasing complexity increased the printing work. The museum's example of St James's, with 68 blocks for a repeat extending across two wallpaper widths, belongs to that particular design. The figure describes this unusually elaborate pattern; other designs required their own block sets. Designer, block maker, printer and the firm issuing the paper each contributed to the finished material. ^[2]

This is why a wallpaper impression is more than a copy of a drawing. The design anticipates a repeat, and the printed paper realises it on a surface intended to occupy a room. A later image that isolates a few flowers can preserve their shapes while removing the connections through which the pattern originally worked. Morris's concern with even coverage and concealed construction becomes clearer when a motif is followed through several repetitions, rather than judged as a small floral picture. ^[4]

Printed cotton changes the process

Morris treated cloth as a related craft with different opportunities. Fabric falls into folds and turns around furniture, so its material and movement interrupt the design. In the 1881 lecture he consequently allowed more freedom in exposing a pattern's structure than on a flat wall. He also asked whether every additional manufacturing process added enough beauty to justify its labour. This was a practical question about the relationship between an effect and the work needed to obtain it. ^[4]

The early commercial history was experimental. According to the V&A, the firm's first printed fabrics in 1868 were copies of earlier white-ground chintzes, produced at Clarkson in Lancashire using blocks. Morris's own Jasmine Trellis, dated 1868–70, was simplified to fit Clarkson's palette. His later work with the dyer Thomas Wardle, beginning in 1875, and the establishment of production at Merton Abbey in 1881 belong to a developing knowledge of textile manufacture. Those textile workshops have a separate production history from Jeffrey's wallpaper printing. ^[3]

A block could do more than put a coloured image on a pale ground. The Huntington's Strawberry Thief, catalogued as block-printed cotton of about 1883, demonstrates a process in which the cloth was first dyed with indigo and a discharge agent was then applied with woodblocks to remove colour selectively. Further block-applied preparations and dyeing stages introduced other colours. The print was built through controlled changes to the cloth, with washing and drying between operations. ^[8]

That distinction matters when describing a “Morris floral print”: block-printed paper and an indigo-discharge textile may share repeat design, yet their colour reaches the finished surface by different means. Following the manufacture of Morris's printed fabrics reveals why a similar-looking repeat can demand a different sequence of work. ^{[2] [8]}

From an illustrator's drawing to a book impression

The books introduce another division of work. In his account of the Kelmscott Press, Sydney Cockerell explains that Burne-Jones's original illustrations were nearly all in pencil. Robert Catterson-Smith redrew most in ink, with Charles Fairfax Murray undertaking a few; Burne-Jones then revised the drawings before their photographic transfer to wood. The sequence separated the invention of the image from its preparation for cutting. The printed line had to survive operations that a shaded pencil drawing did not. ^[5]

Wood engraving is a relief process: the parts left standing receive ink and transfer the image to paper. In the technical distinction used by the V&A, a woodcut is cut on a plank surface with the grain running along it, while wood engraving uses the dense end grain. “Woodcut” also occurs more broadly in historical descriptions of the Kelmscott illustrations, including Morris's own writing. The wording of a period account therefore needs to be read alongside its explanation of who designed and who engraved. It does not turn an illustration into a copperplate engraving or an etching, which belong to different printing processes. ^{[9] [5]}

The Kelmscott Chaucer provides the fullest familiar example. Its 87 illustrations were designed by Edward Burne-Jones, while Morris designed the type, layout, frames, borders and initials. The University of Maryland's exhibition describes Emery Walker supplying photographs of an original drawing, Catterson-Smith strengthening the image over a coating of Chinese white, and the revised drawing being transferred photographically to the block for William Harcourt Hooper to engrave. Photography assisted the making of a hand-engraved printing surface. ^[10]

Hooper's contribution was therefore neither the original figure design nor the running of every printed sheet through the press. He cut the blocks for Burne-Jones's Chaucer illustrations. Cockerell separately credits C. E. Keates, Hooper and William Spielmeyer with engraving the book's Morris-designed decorative elements. Across the Press's publications, other names and exceptions appear: A. Leverett engraved Walter Crane's illustrations for the 1894 Glittering Plain, and George F. Campfield cut some early initials. “Designed by Morris” and “engraved by Morris” are different statements. ^[5]

The printed image belongs to the page

Morris's own Note, written in November 1895, places ornament within a larger set of decisions. Paper, letter shapes, spacing and the position of printing on the page all mattered. He credited Edward Prince with cutting the punches for his type designs and Joseph Batchelor with producing paper to his requirements. Cockerell's history also names the Bowdens, father and son, as compositor and printing staff at the Press's beginning. The finished page depended on specialist material and workshop knowledge as well as Morris's direction. ^[5]

Publishing was another responsibility: issuing the edition under a named publisher, as distinct from making its printed sheets. Cockerell's catalogue names William Morris as publisher of the Chaucer, but the Kelmscott Press as publisher of the posthumous Note. A book's illustrator, printer, publisher and seller need not be the same person or organisation. ^[5]

The sheets themselves were printed on Albion handpresses. Cockerell records that the most satisfactory black ink came from Hanover, after inks from several English firms had been tried. Morris considered making his own ink but never carried out the plan. His experiments with textile dyeing should therefore not be taken as evidence that he manufactured the Press's ink: Cockerell describes a different material and supply history. ^[5]

The decorated opening of the Chaucer makes that arrangement visible. On the left, large lettering is embedded in a field of foliage; on the right, a framed illustration sits above the opening text, with a large ornamental initial below it. Broad outer borders connect the two sides. The differences in scale between lettering, picture, initial and body text guide the eye through an exceptionally dense surface. Morris's insistence that the unit of a book was the pair of pages helps explain why a cropped illustration offers only part of this experience. ^[5]

Cockerell also records differences in what actually met the paper. Recurrent initials and ornaments were printed from electrotypes, metal duplicates of the relief surfaces, whereas most title pages and initial words were printed directly from wood. Most illustrations by Burne-Jones, Crane and Charles March Gere likewise printed from wood, but some other images used photographic process blocks. A Kelmscott impression could therefore come from a metal duplicate or a process block as well as from original wood. ^[5]

The 1893 News from Nowhere offers a compact example of distinct credits and changing context. The Gallery's K5 record identifies Gere as designer of its view of the entrance to Kelmscott Manor, Hooper as maker, the Kelmscott Press as printer, and Reeves & Turner as seller. Morris designed the inscription and its scrolling-leaf border. The illustration appeared again in the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft Press's 1895 booklet Gossip about an Old House on the Upper Thames, without that border and with a different title below. Reusing an image could change its relationship with words without changing its basic subject. ^[11]

What Morris himself cut

Morris did engrave woodblocks, particularly in the earlier book projects. Cockerell describes 44 illustrations cut for the projected Cupid and Psyche sequence, about 35 executed by Morris and the remainder by George Y. Wardle, Campfield, C. J. Faulkner and Elizabeth Burden. He also records initials and side ornaments that Morris both drew and engraved for an abandoned illustrated Love Is Enough. These activities give substance to Morris's practical involvement without making him the cutter of the later Press's entire output. ^[5]

The 1898 Note returns this early work to view through Psyche borne off by Zephyrus. The Gallery explicitly credits Burne-Jones with designing the illustration and Morris with cutting it. Its later publication also shows why “posthumous” needs a precise object: a posthumously issued book can contain an impression from a block Morris actually cut during his lifetime. The design date, the block's making and the date of the printed book describe separate events. ^[1]

The Kelmscott Press brought these earlier experiments into a coordinated workshop. Cockerell's credits allow an individual image to be followed through it, without assuming that Morris engraved the pictures or operated the press for every impression. ^[5]

Later printings can preserve blocks and change colours

The same distinction between design and impression is essential for furnishing patterns. The Gallery's Chrysanthemum specimen B172 was printed by Arthur Sanderson & Sons around 1960, from a design Morris made in 1877. It is catalogued as block-printed in distemper. The Gallery states that its purple and turquoise colourway was not an original Morris & Co. colourway and suggests that Sanderson updated it for modern customers. The specimen is evidence of the pattern's later manufacture and recolouring, not a Victorian sheet made in those colours. ^[12]

An original block does not, by itself, make every impression an original-period impression. The Gallery's Hyacinth B101 was printed by Sanderson in 1968 using original Morris & Co. blocks. Its design is credited to John Henry Dearle and dated about 1900–12. Sanderson acquired the blocks when Morris & Co. closed in 1940. The surviving printing surface connects the later sheet to the firm's manufacturing history, while its maker, printing date and designer remain explicitly recorded. Calling it a “Morris print” identifies a firm's repertoire only loosely; Dearle's credit identifies the designer. ^[13]

A modern reproduction introduces another possibility: it can reproduce the appearance of an earlier object through a new printing method. Digital inkjet printing, for example, applies ink through nozzles rather than taking an impression from a carved wooden surface. The recognisable arrangement of leaves may survive, but recognising the arrangement does not establish how or when the new object was printed. A reproduction's medium and publication details describe its own manufacture. ^[9]

Reading the particular sheet or book

Collections help because they keep different kinds of printed material beside one another without treating them as equivalent. The Huntington distinguishes original Chaucer copies, separate leaves from incomplete copies, and facsimiles of the complete work. Its Press ephemera include sketches, annotated proofs, trial pages, advertising circulars and order forms. Such material records stages and purposes within printing, rather than a single category of finished decorative image. ^[14]

For a book image, the title and edition establish its publication context; a leaf, a proof and a complete bound volume describe different physical objects. For wallpaper or cloth, the design date needs to be distinguished from the specimen's production date. A museum's accession number identifies the particular object discussed, while dimensions may describe an entire sheet or fragment rather than the repeating unit. In B101, for example, the Gallery gives the Hyacinth sheet as 182.9 by 55.9 centimetres and its repeat as 49.5 by 53.3 centimetres. Those measurements answer different questions. ^{[13] [14]}

Scale also changes what an image allows us to see. A small reproduction can make a complete repeat readable at a glance, while a close crop brings an individual flower forward and conceals its neighbours. A detached book illustration similarly loses the adjoining type and borders. Following the repeat across a textile or looking across an entire book opening restores relationships that the isolated motif cannot show: how an edge continues, where a picture sits, and how ornament gives the printed surface its rhythm. ^{[4] [5]}