Fruit, Dark Ground · William Morris Wallpaper Print

Fruit, Dark Ground - a wallpaper designed by William Morris, 1866.

Fruit, also called Pomegranate, is one of the three wallpapers Morris designed first, in the early 1860s, with Trellis and Daisy: lemons, oranges, peaches and pomegranates on diagonal branches. This colourway sets them on a near-black ground.

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.

Reproduced from a high-resolution photograph of the original, with the colours left as the block printer laid them and nothing redrawn. Printed to order on cotton-fibre archival paper at one size, with a wide mount cut so the border is even on all four sides, and framed by hand in our own workshop.