Persian Styled Print by Inglis & Wakefield

Illustration: Inglis & Wakefield. Persian styled pattern block print, 1849.

Indian and Persian textile design work has proved popular in Britain from the seventeenth century onwards. They were consistently used to such an extent that they could honestly be considered as an integral part of British decorative arts history. They were consumed as both costume and furnishing fabrics and were produced in prodigious amounts as printed and woven fabrics.

Although large amounts of textiles were imported directly from source in what is now Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, attempts were made in Britain by a number of companies to produce styled, though not necessarily copies, of textiles from the source nations and regions. Many of these if worked successfully, sometimes proved even as popular as the imported versions.

The example illustrating this article was produced by the English company Inglis & Wakefield in 1849. It is a block print supposedly based on an original Persian design, though could well have been constructed in England as a composite of various Indian and Persian examples. Interestingly it seems to be firmly based on a woven construct, even though it is most definitely printed. There were a number of critics of the period who were concerned that crossovers between woven and printed textiles did not always work as both disciplines arrived at textiles from very different start points. Henry Cole in his Journal of Design and Manufactures drew attention to the issue of printed and woven textiles. In an 1849 issue, the magazine openly questioned a group of Indian and Persian styled fabrics of which this particular Inglis & Wakefield design was a part. 

'It is curious that these printed imitations of Persian or Indian patterns continue to have given to them the same regular treatment of lines necessary to the woven fabrics, for which they were first designed, where the form altars thread by thread, and it is worth while to consider whether this peculiarity conduces to their beauty or merely to their imitative association.'

Having said that, the magazine was also at pains to state that good design work could always be produced if certain elements were set in place. These design elements could give,

'...the same distributive treatment of the same rich full colours, added to the more flowing forms attainable by printing, would give much novelty, while the beauty resulting from the Indian principle of design would remain.'

The 'Indian principle of design' is an important point to be made when considering this particular design, but also that of the larger British textile design industry as a whole. Traditional Indian textile design work, whether printed, woven or embroidered, was considered to be consistently successful by many British design and decoration critics, particularly during this period of the mid-nineteenth century. It was often held up as a supreme example of the working virtues of the Design Reform movement. Many true examples of Indian work, rather than copies or re-imaginings, were praised in Britain as being probably the best contemporary examples of textile design then available. Compositional balance, harmony of colour, honesty to materials all were seen as essential to good design work. These were also seen to be core values of both the Design Reformers and later that of the English Arts & Crafts movement. 

Critics of British design manufacturing and the retail trade that it supplied were lucky enough to have a large supply of prime examples of contemporary Indian textile design in which to prove the justification for a well-balanced and harmonious attitude towards decoration and pattern work. It gave them a much-needed physical and technical guidance in which to strengthen their argument as to the more dubious outpourings from the British textile industry. 

However, as the Journal of Design and Manufactures reports, there was some debate as to whether pattern design based on Persian and Indian examples was truly being used by elements of the British textile industry as a clear indication of design reform, or whether as suspected by many, it was merely an intrinsic part of the need for both fashion and novelty by the general public, and the desire of industry and the retail trade to fuel and expand those needs.

The issue of good design versus immediate novelty through fashion is a long argued one that derives directly from the mid-nineteenth century. This is an issue that still plagues us today over a century and a half later. If anything it is perhaps even more acute in our own contemporary world considering the accumulation of problems that we are having to at least address, if not solve. Many of these derive directly from the industrialization of craft in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and the resulting industrialization of the retail market. More importantly, it also saw the industrialisation of the needs of the individual, creating an artificially constant consumer market that could never be satiated.

However, the fact that Indian textile pattern work was used directly, along with other more diverse and far ranging examples, both contemporary and traditional, is an important reminder of how intrinsically entwined Indian crafts, both decorative and ornamental, were in the more general world of the British decorative arts. It is also a reminder of the influence India had on the much more specific and pioneering worlds of the Design Reform and Arts & Crafts movements. Movements that were to fundamentally change many aspects of British design, decoration and craft, throughout much of the latter nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.

Further reading links:
Indian Textiles (Revised and Expanded Edition)
Traditional Indian Textiles
Chintz: Indian Textiles for the West
Tradition and Beyond: Handcrafted Indian Textiles
Textile Arts of India
Threads & Voices: Behind the Indian Textile Tradition
Rajasthan
Costumes and Textiles of Royal India
Paisleys and Other Textile Designs from India (Dover Pictorial Archives)
Textiles and Dress of Gujarat
How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500-1850 (Global Economic History Series)
Cloth and Commerce: Textiles in Colonial India
Ralli Quilts: Traditional Textiles from Pakistan and India
Woven Wonder: The Tradition of Indian Textiles (Eternal India)
Textiles and Weavers in Medieval South India (Oxford India Paperbacks)
Chintz and Cotton India's Textile Gift to the World

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