William Morris wallpaper designs
He created fifty different block-printed wallpapers, all with intricate, stylised patterns based on nature, particularly upon the native flowers and plants of Britain.
His primary objective was to make the wallpaper by hand, with transparent oil colours on zinc plates.
However, when he could not make this work to his satisfaction, he gave the task to an established wallpaper firm, Jeffrey and company, which printed it with wood blocks and distemper colours.
[5] In the 1870s, through practice and continual refinement, he achieved a mastery of the technique and a more sophisticated and subtle style, with a finer balance between color, variety, and structure.
A typical Morris wallpaper in the 1870s required as much as four weeks to manufacture, using thirty different printing blocks and fifteen separate colours.
[7] The wallpapers of Morris were regarded as strange and excessive for most wealthy Victorians, who preferred the more geometric and traditional French styles.
He also had as few avant-garde aristocratic clients, including the Earl and Countess of Carlisle, who used the 'Bird and Anemone' and two sunflower designs in their home at Castle Howard in Yorkshire.
In his wallpapers of this period, he reverted to more naturalistic themes, somewhat less three-dimensional than his earlier work, but with an exceptional harmony and rhythm, as in his designs Poppy (1885) and Acorn.
In the 1880s, his work finally received royal attention: In 1880 he was asked to redecorate rooms St. James's Palace in London.
James's', which used sixty-eight separate printing blocks to make a section of two wallpaper widths, with a height 127 centimeters.
Between 1864 and 1867, for his early wallpapers such as the Trellis, Fruit/Pomegranate, he experimented with printing them with blocks of zinc but decided that this was too complex and took too long.
He describes how the wallpapers of Morris were made using pieces of paper thirty-feet long and twenty-one inches wide.
Details and fine lines were reproduced with flat brass wires that were driven edgewise into the block.
The pigments, made with natural ingredients, were mixed with sizing or a binder, and then put into shallow trays, called wells.
[11] Morris's friend Walter Crane wrote, "...Mr. William Morris has shown what beauty and character in pattern, and good and delicate choice of tint can do for us, giving in short a new impulse to design, a great amount of ingenuity and enterprise has been spent on wallpapers in England, and in the better minds a very distinct advance has been made upon the patterns of inconceivable hideousness, often of French origin, of the period of the Second Empire - a period which perhaps represents the most degraded level of taste in decoration generally.
He placed his flowers and plants in series which were carefully created to be rhythmic and balanced, giving a sense of order and harmony.
