Trellis · William Morris Wallpaper Print

Trellis - a wallpaper designed by William Morris, 1862.

Trellis was Morris's first wallpaper design, inspired by the rose trellises in the garden of Red House, the home he built in Kent after his marriage. The birds were drawn by his friend the architect Philip Webb.

Cropped to show the pattern edge to edge with no border, so it reads as a panel of the design itself rather than a sample.

William Morris (1834-1896) was a designer, poet and campaigner who did more than anyone to found the Arts and Crafts movement. In 1861 he set up the decorating firm that became Morris & Co., and over the next thirty years designed some fifty wallpapers and many more textiles, drawn from the plants of the English countryside and from the medieval tapestries and manuscripts he loved. His patterns have never gone out of print.

The wallpapers were printed by hand for the firm by Jeffrey & Co. of Islington, from carved pearwood blocks, one block for each colour, laid down one after another so that each colour dried before the next went on. That slow method gives the flat, slightly uneven colour that machine prints of Morris patterns never quite match.

Prepared from a high-resolution scan of an original sample, keeping the slight unevenness of colour that comes from printing by hand. Made to order on heavyweight cotton-fibre archival paper and sold at a single size, mounted with an equal border all round and framed in-house.