The Home Beautiful: The William Morris "Trellis" Wallpaper, 1862

Wallpaper
William Morris, 1862
The Victoria & Albert Museum

Here we see the famous “Trellis” wallpaper pattern by the celebrated designer William Morris. The pattern consists of a thorned rose bush with red flowers, growing on a wooden trellis, surrounded by birds and flying insects against a pale blue ground. The paper was block-printed in distemper colors on paper. This example is inscribed in ink on the back “Trellis 9 / 8/8” and was part of Volume 1, a pattern book containing 25 Morris & Co. patterns from 1862-81.

Wallpaper, in Britain, has been used in interior decoration since the Sixteenth Century although, at first, mostly by the upper classes. By the late Nineteenth Century, wallpaper was used by all classes, both in homes and in industrial or public buildings.

Among the chief designers of such wallpaper, William Morris created countless examples with repeating patterns based on natural forms. He was encouraged to design his own wallpapers because he could not find any that he liked as he was decorating his own home—“The Red House.” Morris designed the “Trellis” pattern shortly after moving to the Red House and based the pattern on the existing rose gardens and trellises which dominated the landscape.

This is typical of Morris's early wallpaper patterns—incorporating simple bird and floral patterns and solid colored backgrounds. These patterns, Morris thought, were a relief from the boldly colored pictorial and figural patterns which were then fashionable with the middle classes.