Tulip by William Morris

What Tulip shows

Tulip by William Morris shows large, stylized flower heads framed by heavy, curving acanthus leaves. The blossoms feature distinctive flared petals with ribbed shading that fan out from slender stems. Dense, deeply cut foliage twists through the composition, filling the frame so that very little bare space remains. A fine stippled pattern textures the ground behind the botanical elements, giving the surface extra visual depth.

The stems weave upward in serpentine curves, alternating the direction of the open blooms across the repeat. Each tulip head tilts gently, balanced by curled leaf tips that arch over and under adjacent stems. Fine line engraving defines the interior veins of every leaf, creating subtle tonal variations across the foliage. The result is a rhythmic, energetic botanical pattern that remains balanced across continuous lengths of cloth.

Who designed it and when

William Morris designed Tulip in 1875. In our guide to William Morris and his work, you can learn more about how his decorative arts firm, known as Morris & Co. after 1875, produced household furnishings that emphasized harmony and high-quality materials. Morris insisted on fair labor conditions and drew inspiration from historical botanical forms rather than the cluttered ornament common in industrial Victorian homes.

While later patterns in the firm’s catalog were created by colleagues like John Henry Dearle, museum records from the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago confirm William Morris as the designer of Tulip. Textiles ranked among the most successful goods his firm offered, standing alongside later celebrated patterns such as the Strawberry Thief printed cotton.

How it was made and used

Tulip was produced as a textile rather than a wallpaper. The Cleveland Museum of Art records describe the original medium as roller printed cotton, manufactured in England during the nineteenth century. The design was intended for interior furnishings, bringing natural motifs into domestic rooms through curtains, draperies, and upholstery fabrics.

Printed cottons formed a major foundation of the firm’s business, which also produced embroidery, woven fabrics, carpets, and tapestries. Production of Tulip extended well beyond its initial release year. Museum objects show that fabric printers continued to produce runs of the pattern between 1917 and 1925 using Morris’s original 1875 design framework. You can explore other historic fabrics and wallpapers across the firm’s catalog in our complete collection of William Morris designs.

Colourways

This site presents Tulip in two distinct colourways taken directly from high-resolution, public-domain museum scans:

• Dark Green on Stone: Based on an 1875 printed cotton textile in the Cleveland Museum of Art, this colourway features dark sage-green foliage and pale tulip petals set against a soft, light stone ground.
• Teal: Sourced from a textile print dated 1917–1925 in the Art Institute of Chicago, this colourway uses deep teal and rich petrol-blue tones across the leaves, paired with warm cream blossoms against a peachy ground.

Tulip as a print

Tulip is available as an art print, printed and shipped by ArtsyWall in three formats: Archival Paper, Premium Canvas, and Framed Canvas. On textured cotton paper, the fine hatched lines of the foliage retain the sharp clarity of the original nineteenth-century cotton printing. In a canvas format, the pattern spreads across an unbroken surface that echoes the texture of historic furnishings.

Framed Canvas prints arrive ready to hang with attached wire and come in six wood finishes: black, white, gold, silver, walnut, and oak. The floating frame leaves a subtle gap around the canvas edge, letting the dense foliage of Morris’s design stand out cleanly on any wall.