Printed Ecologies: William Morris and the Rural Thames

Abstract

William Morris was a Londoner and, in his day-to-day life, he looked out on an urban, polluted Thames River landscape at Hammersmith. However, he turned away from the metropolis to pursue a pastoralist vision of the English countryside in his designs, writings, and life. This essay explores the expression of that pastoral in Morris’s printed repeating-pattern designs, arguing that those patterns are indirect representations of the landscape he most admired: the rural reaches of the Upper Thames and its tributaries. Morris’s plant motifs and visual effects reflect the botany and physical forms of the riparian environment he encountered at his Thameside country home, Kelmscott Manor. A close inspection of that landscape and ecosystem reveals not only the inspiration for Morris’s designs, but also the process by which he selected and elevated certain aspects of the countryside to create his personal pastoral. His patterns are more than decorations for walls and furniture: they are intentional, highly specific evocations of a place and an environment, deeply tied to his broader vision of a rural, equitable, and anti-modern England.