Snakeshead

The flower that gives Snakeshead its name is easy to overlook. Small, nodding fritillaries sit among much larger, upright floral forms and curling foliage. William Morris designed the pattern in 1876, and its title refers to the snake’s-head fritillary: a bell-shaped flower associated with English meadows. Finding these modest blooms changes the way the design looks. What first seems an exuberant mass of ornament begins to reveal differences of scale, direction and character. ^{[1] [2]}

Snakeshead also belongs to a particular moment in Morris’s work with printed cloth. He was developing his command of dyeing through collaboration with Thomas Wardle at Leek in Staffordshire. An early sample at the Huntington credits Morris with the design and Wardle with manufacture. Other surviving pieces were printed decades later. The Art Institute of Chicago, for example, dates its cloth to 1925–40 while retaining 1876 as the design date. Looking at Snakeshead therefore means following two connected histories: the invention of a repeat pattern and the continuing production of the fabric that carried it. ^{[3] [4]}

Finding the flowers in the pattern

In the Chicago example, large red and yellow floral forms establish a strong upright rhythm. Between them, pale green and blue-green leaves curl across a very dark ground. Smaller red bells, delicately marked with pale dots, hang from curved stems. They turn downwards while the larger flowers rise, giving the surface a movement that travels in more than one direction. The design alternates these points of emphasis, so the eye can move between broad shapes and fine details without losing its place. ^[4]

The contrast between the small bells and the large flowers matters more than an exhaustive botanical inventory. It gives the pattern an internal hierarchy. The larger forms are legible at a distance; the smaller ones reward a closer view. The dark spaces between the stems keep their contours distinct, even where the foliage is dense. Across a length of cloth, the repetitions build a regular framework, but the numerous turns and subsidiary branches keep attention moving within it. In the Chicago specimen, the colour contrasts help make this elaborate structure legible. ^[4]

A piece at the Cleveland Museum of Art shows how familiar the arrangement can remain in another surviving textile. Pale foliage and cream-coloured flowers stand against a dark field, with red accents linking the small blooms to the larger forms. Cleveland dates this printed plain-weave cotton to the early twentieth century and currently qualifies its creator entry as “designed in imitation of” William Morris. The qualified attribution and later date distinguish this cloth from the securely documented early examples, even as its flowers and foliage invite close comparison. ^[16]

Morris’s later lecture Some Hints on Pattern-Designing offers a helpful language for looking at such growth. He wanted a firm outline and a convincing connection between one element and the next. A plant spray forced into a convenient shape was an inadequate starting point: the designer needed an overall idea before drawing the individual flowers and leaves. Applied to Snakeshead, this invites attention to how its stems carry and connect the motifs, as well as to the motifs themselves. The lecture explains Morris’s principles; it is not a surviving account of his decisions while drawing this particular design. ^[17]

A pattern made for cloth

Although Snakeshead is often encountered as a flat image, it is a furnishing textile. The Huntington identifies its early sample as block-printed cotton, while Chicago specifies a plain-weave cotton ground with the pattern block printed upon it. The woven structure makes the cloth; printing supplies the coloured ornament. It is this combination of a woven ground and printed ornament that places Snakeshead within Morris’s printed fabrics. ^{[3] [4]}

Morris distinguished the demands of printed cloth from those of wallpaper. In Some Hints on Pattern-Designing, he explained that fabric usually falls into folds or curves around furniture. This changes how conspicuous the underlying repeat becomes. A flat wall might expose an unintended line across a pattern, whereas folds interrupt the fabric’s regular surface. He consequently allowed cloth a more evident construction and a more adventurous play of colour and fantastic flowers. His historical discussion also associated printed cotton with Eastern manufacture; this was part of his own nineteenth-century account of the craft. ^[17]

The upright forms in Snakeshead can be considered in that context. In a flat museum sample they form a readily traceable sequence. In folds, some flowers would advance into the light while others disappeared into the recesses, breaking the sequence into narrower glimpses. That is a consequence of the material’s use, rather than evidence for a particular documented Snakeshead interior. It helps explain why analysing only a small, perfectly flat crop gives an incomplete sense of a furnishing pattern. Morris designed ornament for surfaces that people would live with and handle, and his lecture asks the designer to understand those surfaces. ^[17]

He also insisted that every extra manufacturing process should contribute enough beauty to justify the work it required. Printed cotton could absorb considerable technical effort despite the modest cost of the underlying material. In this view, an intricate pattern was a decision about labour as well as appearance. The many small marks in Snakeshead are worth examining because they participate in the whole: the dotted bells, narrow leaves and fine stems give smaller-scale activity to the spaces between the broad flowers. This is an interpretation of their visual function, informed by Morris’s stated concern that complexity earn its place. ^{[4] [17]}

Morris and Wardle at Leek

Morris’s search for satisfactory colour preceded Snakeshead. The V&A describes his disappointment with the effect of Prussian blue in an early printing of Tulip and Willow, designed in 1873. In 1875 he began working with Thomas Wardle, who owned a dyeing works at Leek. The relationship brought a designer determined to recover older colour processes into sustained contact with a specialist manufacturing setting. ^[5]

The William Morris Gallery places Snakeshead at the height of that collaboration. Its account describes Morris moving from vegetable-dye experiments at his Queen Square home to larger-scale work at Leek, where more difficult dyes could be investigated. This is a useful change of scale: a successful domestic experiment was only one step towards producing consistent lengths of cloth for customers. Wardle’s contribution belongs to that practical history, alongside Morris’s design. ^[2]

The Huntington’s sample makes the connection unusually concrete. Catalogued around 1876, it names William Morris as designer, Morris and Company among the makers, and Thomas Wardle of Leek, Staffordshire, as manufacturer. The museum describes a dark blue ground, interwoven light blue and green leafy growth, small red and yellow flowers, and larger yellow flowers rising from red bases. Its attribution joins a surviving piece of patterned cotton to the named collaborator, rather than leaving the partnership as background biography. ^[3]

Chicago’s museum account dates first production in collaboration with Wardle to 1877, following three months of experimentation. This is a different statement from dating the design to 1876, and it sits beside the Huntington’s approximate date for its early specimen. Together the records describe development around 1876–77 without providing grounds for assigning every stage a single exact date. Nor does the early partnership establish where every later length was printed. Chicago’s twentieth-century specimen has its own manufacturer credits, including Wardle & Co. of Bridgnorth. That later credit is distinct from the Huntington’s identification of Thomas Wardle at Leek. ^{[3] [4]}

What the colours required

The importance of the Leek experiments becomes clearer through Morris’s own Of Dyeing as an Art, published in Arts and Crafts Essays in 1893. Writing well after the creation of Snakeshead, he organised his account around four starting colours: blue, red, yellow and brown. Combining and modifying them could yield a much larger range. His essay explains a body of craft knowledge and an aesthetic preference; it does not supply a production sheet for any particular surviving Snakeshead. ^[18]

For blue, Morris discussed indigo and woad. Indigo had to be reduced to make it soluble, then absorbed by the cloth in the vat. Exposure to air oxidised it again, restoring the blue colour and making it insoluble. Repeating the operation deepened the shade. Morris stressed the experience needed to prepare and manage the vat. A rich blue was consequently the result of controlled work through successive stages, rather than a colour selected once and simply painted onto the fabric. ^[18]

Other colours required different treatment. Morris described madder as a source of reds and weld, also called wild mignonette, as a yellow dyestuff. These worked with mordants: substances used to prepare the fibre so that the dye could become fixed upon it. His account of printed cotton explains how different strengths or kinds of mordant could be printed before the cloth entered a madder bath, producing different colours in different areas. Further washing and clearing were part of the process. A block could therefore apply a chemical preparation that determined a later colour, rather than always depositing the final visible colour directly. ^[18]

Walnut roots or green husks supplied browns in Morris’s account, and could help darken or modify other colours. He explained green through blue followed by yellow, and purple through blue combined with a red dyestuff. This makes the breadth of colour available from a limited group of materials understandable. It also shows why a photograph cannot identify a dye recipe. A visible green tells us what a surface looks like under particular conditions; it does not, by itself, tell us which sequence or materials produced it. For an individual length of Snakeshead, that requires specific documentary or technical evidence. ^[18]

Morris strongly preferred older dyestuffs to the commercial synthetic dyes of his day. His essay combines practical explanation with a forceful argument about the degradation of craft by commercial priorities. Those judgments need to be read as his position. He nevertheless acknowledged that the natural colours he admired faded in sunlight. He valued the appearance of that fading, rather than claiming that the colours escaped change. A surviving textile thus carries its own history of light, wear and preservation, and its present appearance cannot be treated as an untouched record of the first printing. ^[18]

The larger manufacturing history continued after Leek. The V&A places the consolidation of Morris’s workshops at Merton Abbey in 1881, where water and space supported the washing, drying and dyeing of cloth. That later setting is central to Morris & Company and designs such as Strawberry Thief, extending the practical investigation that had helped produce Snakeshead. ^[5]

Indian textiles and English water meadows

The William Morris Gallery identifies the rich colours of Indian printed fabrics as a shared source of admiration for Morris and Wardle. That offers a precise way to understand cultural influence here: historical textiles helped furnish a model of what coloured cloth could achieve. It does not establish a single Indian object copied for Snakeshead, or make the plants in the pattern Indian species. The colour tradition and the botanical subject are different parts of the design’s history. ^[2]

Sarah Mead Leonard’s study Printed Ecologies: William Morris and the Rural Thames gives the fritillary a more local context. She connects its chequered, bell-shaped flower with the water meadows of the Upper Thames. Drawing on Morris’s correspondence and diary, she also records his attention to its flowering and his excursions to gather it. Her argument treats the plant as evidence of his close engagement with a particular landscape and its environmental conditions. This is Leonard’s scholarly interpretation, supported by the historical material she cites, rather than an explanation Morris left for every motif. ^[19]

Leonard also distinguishes Snakeshead, the 1876 textile, from Fritillary, the separate wallpaper of 1885. She argues more broadly that Morris’s patterns evoke landscapes through selected and transformed forms, rather than reproducing one exact site. That is especially helpful here. The small bells retain their identity within a much more elaborate ornamental construction. The pattern can draw upon observed flowers while also participating in a history of textile design. Neither strand requires a story about hidden snakes or a symbolic code. ^[19]

Reading the surviving cloth

Surviving pieces let us follow the design beyond its initial development. Birmingham Museums Trust catalogues sample 1941M398 as Snakeshead, 1876–77: cotton, dyed and block printed, designed by William Morris and manufactured by William Morris & Co. It supplies an early comparison for later cloth. At the William Morris Gallery, F366 is explicitly dated “designed 1876, printed after 1917” and located at Merton Abbey. Those dates refer to different events in the life of the pattern. ^{[6] [2]}

Chicago provides another way of dating manufacture. Its account explains that styles of lettering on the selvedges—the outer edges of the fabric—help establish when printed cloth was made. In specimen 1972.395, that evidence supports the date 1925–40. The photographed piece retains the firm’s name along its edge. Once noticed, this apparently peripheral lettering becomes as historically informative as the flowers: it connects the familiar design with the company’s later trade. ^[4]

A museum sample may preserve only part of a larger length, and its measurements describe that surviving object. The William Morris Gallery’s F345, for instance, measures 33.5 × 67.5 cm; the Huntington’s early sample measures 28.9 × 97.5 cm. Neither set of figures should automatically be read as the size of the repeat. Chicago lists its own cloth dimensions and a separate repeat measurement, making the distinction explicit. The patterned unit, the width of manufactured cloth and the dimensions of a collected fragment answer different questions. ^{[1] [3] [4]}

These details become rewarding when brought back to the surface. A wider surviving piece reveals how the upright flowers recur across the width; a close view reveals the marks within a bell; an intact edge may help date manufacture. Looking from centre to margin therefore changes the history that can be read from the same object. In the Chicago cloth, the small fritillaries and the printed company name belong together: one preserves the distinctive invention of the design, while the other helps place this particular piece within its long working life. ^[4]