Pink and Rose
William Morris
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Henry James described William Morris as "the poet and paper-maker" in 1881 and, despite his prolific work as a designer of stained glass, textiles, tapestries, furniture, and books, it is for his wallpapers that Morris is best known today. Reinventing the decorative vocabulary of his time, Morris believed that "any decoration is futile…when it does not remind you of something beyond itself." He turned to nature for inspiration, seeking to "turn a room into a bower." Throughout his more than three decades as a wallpaper designer, the native field and garden flowers of the English countryside proved a touchstone. Beginning in 1862 with the firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company, and later on his own with Morris & Company, Morris designed forty-one wallpapers and five ceiling papers. "Pink and Rose," from about 1890, is typical of his late style, which is characterized by naturalism and a clearly articulated repeating pattern. Morris believed that beauty, imagination, and order were the essential components of a successful design, with all three qualities evident in this example. As well as being a great commercial success, his papers helped to raise British wallpaper to a position of international preeminence in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Drawings and Prints
An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.