Willow Bough by William Morris

What Willow Bough shows

Willow Bough by William Morris displays a dense, rhythmic pattern of curling willow branches laden with long, pointed leaves. The stems curve across the surface in sweeping diagonals, splitting into smaller shoots that intertwine with neighboring boughs. Each lance-shaped leaf is rendered with a dark center vein and an organic curve, giving the whole composition the feeling of a living tree canopy seen from below.

The arrangement fills the visual field without leaving large blank voids. Depending on the colourway, you see either a clean, solid background or an intricate secondary ground powdered with delicate dots and tiny four-petaled florets. The layered branches create a rich sense of depth through overlapping forms rather than artificial perspective or shading.

Who designed it and when

William Morris designed Willow Bough in 1887. You can trace Morris’s career and development across our guide to William Morris. Although the pattern is firmly credited to Morris, museum catalog records show slight variations: some Cooper Hewitt entries list the designer line as unknown artist, whereas the museum category attributes it to William Morris, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art explicitly names Morris as the designer.

Morris had explored willow foliage earlier in his career, notably in his 1874 pattern Willow. While the 1874 work relied on simpler, diagonal branches against a lighter ground, Willow Bough expanded that botanical theme with more complex intertwining stems and dense foliage. It became one of the most enduring designs cataloged among every William Morris design produced by Morris & Co. during the late nineteenth century.

How it was made and used

Morris & Co. produced Willow Bough as a block-printed wallpaper sidewall. Craftsmen carved the design across multiple relief woodblocks, with separate blocks used to stamp each distinct pigment onto long rolls of paper. Block printing allowed the inks to lie opaque and slightly textured on the paper, giving the foliage clean edges and deep tone.

The design was intended for interior walls in domestic settings. The pattern repeat measures about 10.4 by 17.7 inches according to museum measurements, allowing the branching stems to join seamlessly when hung as sidewall panels. In Victorian homes, decorators often installed Willow Bough across entire rooms to bring the natural structure of English riverbanks indoors.

Colourways

This site presents Willow Bough in three distinct colourways derived from public-domain museum scans:

• Charcoal: Dark grey-green willow leaves and branching stems set over a soft off-white ground powdered with muted blue-grey dots and delicate petal shapes.
• Gold: Warm olive-yellow leaves and branches set against a clean, unadorned light ground.
• Dark Green on Ivory: Deep olive-green foliage arranged over an ivory backdrop, showcasing the crisp silhouette of the woodblock printing.

Each colourway reveals a different aspect of the botanical structure. The powdered ground in Charcoal adds subtle texture between the leaves, while Gold and Dark Green on Ivory emphasize the fluid line of the willow branches against open space.

Willow Bough as a print

You can bring Willow Bough into your home as an art print, printed and shipped by ArtsyWall in three formats: Archival Paper, Premium Canvas, and Framed Canvas. Archival Paper delivers the design on heavy 340gsm cotton rag paper with a textured watercolor feel. Premium Canvas features acid-free canvas hand-stretched over solid wood bars with a sawtooth hanger ready for the wall. Framed Canvas places the stretched canvas inside a wood floating frame, available in black, white, gold, silver, walnut, or oak finishes with an attached hanging wire.

Framed on a wall, Willow Bough creates an earthy focal point where the sweeping branches read clearly from across a room. If you are decorating an entire wall surface instead of hanging a single artwork, you can also find Willow Bough peel-and-stick wallpaper through our sister site.