Daisy, Cream · William Morris Wallpaper Print

Daisy, Cream - a wallpaper designed by William Morris, 1864.

Daisy was the first Morris wallpaper to go on sale, in 1864: clumps of meadow flowers scattered on an open ground in the manner of a medieval millefleurs tapestry. This is the cream colourway.

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.

Taken from a high-resolution photograph of a surviving original, cleaned of dust and marks but otherwise left as it was made. Each print is made to order on cotton-fibre archival paper, then mounted with a wide even border and hand-framed in our workshop rather than sent out.