Collection | Themes | Chrysanthemum wallpaper design

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Highlights

The William Morris Gallery exhibits a wide range of objects, from tapestries and furniture to ceramic tiles, wallpapers, embroidery and paintings. This tour gives you a preview of some of the highlights.

On display

Chrysanthemum wallpaper design (1877)

This is one of Morris’s hand-drawn designs for wallpaper. He drew first in pencil, over a grid which helps establish the regular pattern repeat, then finished the design in watercolour.

The pattern has two layers: a background of yellow leaves, overlaid with meandering chrysanthemum flowers and leaves. Morris thought all successful patterns should have their basis in natural forms, but he didn’t think they should be shown in three dimensions on a flat wall. Here the veins on the blue-green leaves and petals hint at their three-dimensional shape, but the yellow leaves are completely flat.

Morris acknowledged in Some Hints on Pattern Designing that ‘the constant designing of recurring patterns is a very harassing business’. A Manchester calico-printer had told him ‘that the shifty and clever designers’ who draw textile patterns ‘have a great tendency to go mad’!

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Highlights

Chrysanthemum wallpaper design (1877)

William Morris Gallery

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