Jasmine by William Morris

What Jasmine shows

Jasmine is an 1872 wallpaper design by William Morris that weaves climbing jasmine blossoms through a dense thicket of leafy foliage. The design presents a multi-layered botanical scene across a dark ground. In the foreground, winding branches twist and loop across the surface. These pale branches carry small, cream-colored flowers with fluted, star-shaped petals and delicate golden outlines.

Beside the open jasmine blooms, Morris placed dense, rounded clusters of tiny five-petaled blossoms in a warm buff tone. Broad, deeply lobed leaves in muted slate blue spread through the midground, forming a leafy screen that covers almost all of the dark base. Smaller pointed leaves in pale olive green sprout along the slender branches. The intertwining stems connect every section into an unbroken growth, giving you a dense, continuous pattern without open patches of blank wall.

Who designed it and when

William Morris designed Jasmine in 1872. It belongs to a productive period in the early 1870s when Morris established his mature approach to surface pattern. During these years, he studied native British plants, garden climbers, and medieval herbals to create naturalistic yet disciplined repeats. You can learn more about his background, techniques, and career in our guide to William Morris.

Many later patterns sold under the Morris name came from other designers in his workshop, such as John Henry Dearle. However, Jasmine is an authentic William Morris creation, cataloged under his own hand in museum collections. In our pattern library, you can browse every William Morris design to see how his work evolved from early floral wallpapers to later textiles.

How it was made and used

Morris designed Jasmine as a continuous repeat pattern for domestic wallpaper. The pattern relies on precise block printing to align the separate colors and intertwined stems across neighboring sheets. Each color required a separate hand-carved woodblock, which craftsmen inked and pressed by hand onto paper lengths. The layers had to line up exactly so that the wandering jasmine vines crossed the seams without visible breaks.

During the nineteenth century, wallpapers like Jasmine covered parlor and drawing room walls in homes that embraced the Arts and Crafts movement. Unlike later printed textiles such as the famous chintz Strawberry Thief, Morris intended Jasmine specifically for walls. The dense foliage subdued artificial light and softened large wall expanses, creating a quiet, garden-like enclosure indoors.

Colourways

On this site, Jasmine is available in the Indigo colourway. This colourway comes from a public-domain museum scan of an 1872 wallpaper specimen held in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The scan preserves the original color balance and surface texture of the nineteenth-century printed paper.

The Indigo colourway pairs a dark, near-black indigo ground with slate blue foliage, pale olive leaves, and warm buff flower heads. The pale cream jasmine trumpets stand out clearly against the deep blue and shadowy tones beneath them. Because the background remains dark, the pale blossoms and looping branches guide your eye across the surface without harsh contrast.

Jasmine as a print

Prints of Jasmine are printed and shipped by ArtsyWall in three formats: Archival Paper, Premium Canvas, and Framed Canvas. You can also buy the pattern as peel-and-stick wallpaper at https://williammorriswallpapers.com/jasmine-wallpaper/.

When displayed as a framed wall print, Jasmine functions as an intricate botanical study. The balance of muted slate blue and soft cream makes it easy to hang alongside natural wood finishes, painted walls, or traditional furnishings. In a Framed Canvas format, the floating wood frame creates a clean boundary that contains the winding vines, while Archival Paper highlights the paper texture and fine woodblock outlines.