William Morris "Cray" Cloth Placemat

During a prolific career spanning the period in which nineteenth-century England was overtaken by industrialization, William Morris (1834-1896) promoted an alternate vision of life and art. The textiles Morris designed at his workshops possess an exuberant aesthetic poised, at the time of their creation, between earlier textile traditions and a modern sensibility. Cray, a furnishing fabric requiring thirty-four wood blocks to print, was designed by Morris in 1884 and the successful pattern was continually produced over a period of decades in numerous colorways. With its combination of sinuous lines, delicate vines and robust blossoms, Cray fulfills Morris’s dictum that: … in all patterns which are meant to fill the eye and satisfy the mind, there should be a certain mystery. We should not be able to read the whole thing at once, nor desire to do so, nor be impelled by that desire to go on tracing line after line to find out how the pattern is made, and I think that the obvious presence of a geometrical order, if it be, as it should be, beautiful, tends towards this end, and prevents our feeling restless over a pattern. (William Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art, 1882)