Designed by William Morris, 1864.

Morris designed two wallpapers, Daisy and Trellis, in the early 1860s when he was living at Red House. Both designs were registered in February 1864 and the wallpapers were hand-printed for Morris by Jeffrey & Company of Islington. The Daisy pattern was directly inspired by a wall-hanging depicted in a 15th-century manuscript of Froissart’s Chronicles. Morris used similar ‘clumps’ of flowers for embroidery and tile designs of the 1860s.

Designed by William Morris, 1883-4.

Like a number of Morris’s chintz patterns of the 1880s, Wandle is named after a tributary of the river Thames, the Wandle being the stream which flowed past the Morris & Company workshops at Merton Abbey, Surrey. Morris began the design in September 1883, writing to his daughter Jenny that, although ‘the wet Wandle is not big but small’, he wanted to make the pattern ‘very elaborate and splendid … to honour our helpful stream’.

Designed by William Morris, 1875.

The Marigold pattern was one of relatively few which Morris used for both wallpapers and printed textiles. As a wallpaper, the sinuous vertical meander is especially prominent, whereas the pattern-structure is more subtly suggested in a draped textile (e.g. as curtain fabric). Marigold was one of the first textiles to be printed - on both cotton and silk - for Morris by Thomas Wardle at his factory at Leek, Staffordshire.

Designed by William Morris, 1882.

The Brother Rabbit pattern was inspired, according to May Morris, by the ‘Uncle Remus’ stories which her father was reading to the family at their Hammersmith home, Kelmscott House. It was one of the first textiles to be printed at Merton Abbey, where Morris & Co. moved its workshop premises at the end of 1881.