Whatever the variety of their other opinions, visitors to England in the 19th century were united in at least one thing. The country’s urban environment was hideously ugly and any care for or pleasure in buildings and living spaces seemed to have been sacrificed to the needs of burgeoning industrialism.
The early 19th-century English poet William Blake was not the only commentator to speak of the country’s “dark satanic mills” – in this case the textile factories that drove the first phases of the Industrial Revolution. Friedrich Engels, moving to Manchester from his native Germany in the 1840s, wrote on the “Condition of the Working Class in England” for German readers horrified at the social costs of early industrialism.
However, from the mid-century onwards, efforts were made at least to soften its edges, one of the best-known being associated with the designer William Morris. Like his teacher John Ruskin, one of the 19th-century’s greatest art critics, Morris wanted to make Britain better by degrees, starting with improving the design of everyday objects.
His ideas, dubbed “arts and crafts,” soon gave rise to imitators across Europe and among designers wanting to dissolve what they saw as the false distinction between the fine and the useful arts. Art should no longer be only the preserve of the upper classes, they said, but should also be part of the everyday lives of ordinary people and be used to lighten the mood of Europe’s cities.
Morris’s programme for this kind of proselytising design started in the rather unpromising precincts of Britain’s mid-19th century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which wanted to model the art of the time on that of the early Italian Renaissance, and the Gothic mediaevalism of Ruskin and others, which eventually gave rise to the Victorian habit of clothing industrial structures in brickwork with mediaeval turrets.
However, perhaps because he realised that he was not destined to become a painter or an architect, Morris began to look elsewhere for inspiration, turning his attention towards interior design and exploring influences as varied as northern European Gothic, Italian Renaissance, and even ancient Icelandic in his quest to make more aesthetically satisfying wallpapers, curtains, upholstery fabrics and furniture for otherwards drab Victorian homes.
He also became interested in traditional Islamic design and the arabesque and geometrical decoration familiar from Islamic art, with the result that he started to collect Persian carpets, Ottoman ceramics, and Syrian metalware and other objects, using them as inspiration for some of the motifs he wove into his design firm Morris and Company’s textiles and wallpapers.
But while the interest of many 19th-century European artists and designers in such materials is well-known, as is the 19th-century European boom in orientalist painting that provided imaginative images of Middle Eastern and Arab scenes for European purchasers, for some reason Morris’s interest in traditional Islamic art and the use he made of it has only recently become the object of wider attention.
This makes a new exhibition at the William Morris Museum in London on precisely this theme all the more rewarding. Held in the Museum’s main temporary exhibition spaces and organised by a team of mostly external curators, the exhibition, entitled “William Morris and Art from the Islamic World,” looks at what is known about Morris’s interest in Islamic art and gives some examples of materials produced by Morris and Company in which an Islamic design element may be detected.
While the exhibition is unlikely to change people’s broader understanding of Morris’s design career – many of his textile and wallpaper designs are still in production today – it certainly adds more than just an intriguing footnote to the appreciation of this outstanding 19th-century artist.
There is also the question of Morris’s well-known political sympathies – he was a revolutionary socialist in the final decades of his life – and while the exhibition does not dwell on this, for many this aspect of Morris is perhaps even more interesting than his design career, with the latter being largely unintelligible without it.
Morris and Islam: One thing that Morris was not was an art collector or connoisseur on the standard Victorian model, since his interest was always related to how the arts of the past could contribute to the renovation of the arts and crafts of the present.
These were threatened by mass production and the cheapening of design and manufacturing processes as well as the disappearance of traditional skills. Morris wanted to improve standards of design and manufacture and to rebuild craftsmen’s skills, and for this reason if for no other he did not take part in the kind of collecting expeditions carried out by some of his peers with a view to building private collections of Islamic or other forms of art.
However, while Morris never visited the Middle East or indeed any other part of the world outside Western Europe (except Iceland), he did purchase objects from the region from London dealers when and if they came to hand, usually, in so far as his motives can be reconstructed, because they suggested design motifs or methods of working that he could adapt for use in his own workshops.
Unlike Lord (Frederick) Leighton, for example, one of Victorian London’s most successful painters who visited Egypt, North Africa, Syria and other places in order to collect items of Islamic art and even had parts of his house done out in Islamic style, Morris does not seem to have engaged in collecting for the sake of collecting but instead to suggest motifs or ways of working lost to 19th-century mass production.
His widely documented interest in antique Persian carpets from Southwest Asia, for example, then as now highly collectible, seems to have been motivated by just such an interest. The use of repeating patterns on these, the style called in Europe arabesque, could suggest patterns for Morris’s wallpapers and textiles, also confronted with the problem of how to cover extended surfaces with repeating designs without giving rise to monotony and balancing details with overall effect.
Writing in the book accompanying the exhibition, art historian Amanda Phillips notes that Morris owned several pieces of decorated Ottoman velvet known as catma that were decorated with repeating vegetal motifs. These pieces, apparently originally used as wall hangings or upholstery fabrics, were thus similar to the more famous Ottoman tiles that featured repeating tulip, pomegranate, and other motifs, and Morris used them as inspiration for his own textile designs.
“Though some of Morris’s own designs… use an obvious and emphatic repeat common to Ottoman decorative arts, many more use all-over patterning,” she writes. The 1884 design Granada, used for a silk velvet brocade woven in Morris’s south London workshops, uses “four different large-scale motifs, three renderings of pomegranates and almond-shaped buds, connected by ogives [diagonals] and branches,” which, though often used on traditional Iberian textiles (explaining the name), were also used on Ottoman velvets “figured with pomegranates, palmettes, ogives, and even crowns.”
Another design, Dove and Rose, this time from 1879 and produced in silk and wool, features a repeating motif of a dove and a rose “placed among foilage arranged in ogives comprising stems and bound with acanthus leaves,” Phillips writes, apparently a reimagining of 14th-century Italian-Iberian designs.
However, the dove and the rose motif, or more properly the nightingale and the rose, was also to be found on many Persian objects that Morris would have been familiar with as a result of his research at the South Kensington Museum, now London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, notably on carpets and other textiles.
A later essay in the catalogue by art curator Moya Carey goes into more detail regarding Morris’s debt to carpets from Safavid Iran. From the 1880s onwards, he advised the South Kensington Museum on acquisitions of Persian carpets, the idea being to build a reference collection in London for budding designers, and he himself acquired several magnificent historic carpets, including the 17th-century “Vase” carpet from Kerman in Iran (so-called because of a vase motif on the central axis) that once hung on the wall in the dining room of his London house.
Morris hoped to learn the designs and production methods of these carpets in order to produce new ones woven in England to similar standards, Carey says. While he was never able to reproduce the magnificence of the historic Persian carpets in his London workshops, it being impossible to produce anything as sophisticated at a viable price, the study of the Safavid carpets allowed “his own design compositions to come more brilliantly alive,” she says.
This was the case, for example in the use of “twisting foliate scrollwork, ogival trellis systems with oversize blossoms, and the animating presence of birds” in designs such as the Bullerswood carpet produced by Morris and Company in 1889.
Appropriation: The catalogue accompanying the exhibition is perhaps unusually sensitive to what may distance contemporary visitors from Morris’s mental world, even as his designs remain enduringly popular among new generations of purchasers.
There is the question of terminology, for example, with 19th-century European collectors tending to run together multiple traditions in their confident talk of “Islamic art,” by which they meant the arts and crafts of a “diversity of cultures from the Middle East, Turkey, Central Asia, South and South-East Asia, and Africa from the advent of Islam to the present day,” as exhibition curator Qasira Khan puts it in her catalogue essay.
There is also the question of cultural appropriation – in other words, the “taking or use of the cultural products of ‘cultural insiders’ by ‘cultural outsiders.’” The catalogue contains a sensitive essay by exhibition curator Joanna Bradford exploring this issue and arguing that Morris’s use of iconography from other cultures in his work, in this case from the Islamic world, could be seen as problematic today.
She gives the example of his use of vegetal patterns in wallpaper designs such as Pimpernel (1876), which reuses the characteristic pattern principles and underlying geometrical grid of Islamic art, or textile designs such as Snakeshead (1876), which “incorporates small repeating flower motifs characteristic of South Asian block-printed cottons.”
However, whatever individual visitors may make of this debate, probably the overall effect of the exhibition is to take them back to Morris’s work with renewed appreciation.
This is likely to be particularly the case as a result of the detailed investigation of some of Morris’s designs undertaken by lead curators Rowan Bain and Qasira Khan, who trace motifs from Morris’s 1879 textile design Flower Garden back to items imported from Damascus that he viewed at a London dealer in 1878, notably their use of “medallions with strap work, birds, and arabesques,” and the dragon and peacock motifs in Morris’s furnishing textile Peacock and Dragon (1878), intended for use for heavyweight curtains in London homes, to those on 17th-century Iranian ceramics.
Morris’s block-printed cottons on themes from the River Thames in southern England, notably Kennet, Evenlode, Wandle, Lea, and Medway, all produced using the then new indigo-discharge process, use motifs suggested by Ottoman ceramics, Bain and Khan say, notably their use of “stylised lotus blossoms connected by a delicate floral vine” that echo Morris’s design in the Medway fabric produced in 1885 of “a background of white scrolling leaves and tiny flower heads and a forefront of half-open tulips.”
Tulip and Lily, an 1875 design for a machine-woven carpet, seems to have been suggested by Ottoman embroidery, and Wild Tulip (1884), a block-printed wallpaper, draws on tulip and flower motifs found on Ottoman ceramics. “Persian carpets remained the ultimate standard in their category for Morris,” Bain and Khan say, though “he was never able to achieve the same level of production quality in his own carpet manufacturing” – even in the Peacock and Bird and Holland Park designs he produced as one-off commissions.
Overall, Morris’s “originality as a visionary thinker lies in the case he makes for the centrality of art, as well as his striving to return a sense of authenticity and reliability to design and craft that he perceived to have been lost in Britain,” they say. “For this he looked in many directions for inspiration, creating new designs worked within a European aesthetic framework, springboarding from English creativity and incorporating inspiration from across the Islamic world.”
William Morris and Art from the Islamic World, William Morris Gallery, London.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 17 April, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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