William Morris and Brother Rabbit

Illustration: William Morris. Brother Rabbit textile design, 1882.

William Morris textile design Brother Rabbit was designed in 1881, although not released commercially until the following year at his new Merton Abbey works. It was released in a number of colourways including red, green and the above blue. It was also released in wallpaper format and has become a firm favourite of the more stylised approach taken by Morris in some of his 1880s designs such as St James, Strawberry Thief, Granada and Ispahan.

What Brother Rabbit has in common with the other designs mentioned, is both the surprising formality of Morris, but also the larger European influence, which seemed to grow stronger as Morris career developed and as his experience of styles and decorative eras outside of England, became apparent.

To be fair Morris work always had as its inspiration the broader medieval sphere of northern Europe of which England was a component part. Morris was very familiar with a range of textile based work that had been produced in Northern France as well as Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany across generations during the medieval and renaissance periods. However, although he was interested in and understood to a certain extent the medieval and renaissance periods south of the Alps, they did not appear as obviously in his textile work as that of Northern Europe. However, in an increasing number of textile design pieces from the late 1870s onwards, the influence of Italy in particular, became much more apparent.

Morris constantly studied textiles amongst other artefacts that had been collected at the South Kensington Museum, the future Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Although largely European in context, at least in the early collections of the museum, because of its position within the British Empire there was also a considerable and relatively wide-ranging collection of Indian origin which Morris was to use as a comprehensive influence, particularly in his carpet design work. In the context of Brother Rabbit he became genuinely entranced with the sophisticated silk work of Italy, but not necessarily from one period in particular and certainly not contained within his old medieval standard. For example, Brother Rabbit is said to be derived from a seventeenth century Italian design, long after any time period in which Morris is usually associated. However, many of these designs featuring opposing and paired animals both existing and imaginative, have a long history that flows back to the Islamic expansion when Islamic armies and populations were a regular feature of Sicily and Southern Italy and the museum was voraciously collecting specimens from al these time periods and geographical locations. Of course, with most pattern work, design details can always be traced back much further that at first assumed. The type of symmetrically opposing figurative decoration that was used so successfully by Morris, can be traced back through the initial Islamic influence, to Byzantium, ancient Persia and through that culture to the work produced in Assyria, Babylonia and beyond.

Although much of the work that inspired Morris had originally been woven, he decided to reproduce the textile work by using the discharge dyeing technique, which is basically produced by dyeing a fabric and then removing some of the dye by printing with bleach by overlaying a specific pattern onto the fabric. It is a technique that Morris perfected over time and was used to good effect, although some of these design pieces were also traditionally block printed. In some respects the wallpaper pattern work that used Brother Rabbit and other designs in this style, made much less sense than the reworking of woven pattern work to printed. However, Morris who always preferred fabric covered walls rather than wallpaper, whether that be tapestry or panels of woven fabric, could be justified in trying to give the appearance of sumptuous seventeenth century fabrics or even incrementally earlier periods, to a later nineteenth century domestic home. That it probably was not particularly effective, although conceivably profitable, must have sat uncomfortably with Morris.

It is interesting to note that even though Morris produced increasingly more work in this symmetrical mode, his compositions did not become correspondingly simpler in appearance. His pattern work was as convoluted and overlaid as his previous more organic styles. Nature still seemed to be at the heart of his work, no matter where the influence originated. It could be said that although Brother Rabbit might well have been inspired by Italy in the seventeenth century, much of the work was still produced by an Englishman in love with his very English garden and all that that entailed. Having said that, the title Brother Rabbit is said to have derived from across the Atlantic, with the American Uncle Remus stories of Brer Rabbit, which were said to have been a favourite amongst Morris and his family.

Further reading links:
William Morris Full-Color Patterns and Designs (Dover Pictorial Archives)
William Morris: Patterns & Designs (International Design Library)
Designs of William Morris (Phaidon Miniature Editions)
William Morris
William Morris (Temporis)
William Morris on Art and Socialism
The Beauty of Life: William Morris and the Art of Design
William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Home
The Essential William Morris Anthology (12 books) [Illustrated]
William Morris and Morris & Co.
V&A Pattern: William Morris: (Hardcover with CD)
William Morris
William Morris Designs CD-ROM and Book (Full-Color Electronic Design Series)
William Morris Decor and Design
William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (Spectre)
The Gardens of William Morris