How Islamic art became the fabric of quintessentially British design

William Morris is behind some of the country's best-known patterns, but a new exhibition reveals how their roots lie in the Middle East

William Morris's 'Granada' pattern incorporates pomegranates and interlocking designs like those found across the Islamic world. Photo: William Morris Gallery

The influence of Islamic art on the designer William Morris seems so obvious that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Though Morris’s designs are synonymous with Britishness – his leafy designs grace tea towels across the UK – a new exhibition at London's William Morris Gallery reveals the profound impact of the Middle East on the designer and the studio he led throughout the late 19th century.

“Morris’s interest in Islamic art has always been a footnote but never fully understood,” says Rowan Bain, the gallery’s curator, who put together William Morris and Art from the Islamic World with Qaisra M Khan, a curator at the Khalili Collections. “We’re trying to look at Islamic objects he owned to draw links between them and his designs and to broaden our understanding of the quintessentially British designer.”

Morris set up an important design workshop in the 1860s that revived artisanal skills during a time of pervasive mechanisation. Eventually known as the Arts and Crafts movement, it was part of a wider desire to look back to pre-industrial Britain, such as the Pre-Raphaelite painters and writers, who drew inspiration from medieval Europe, or the fascination with the Gothic in design and architecture (such as the ornate Palace of Westminster, completed in 1876).

In Morris’s Art and Crafts designs, patterns were inspired by the seasons and the natural world; crafts such as tapestries and embroidery were re-employed; and technical skills were celebrated as forging a more honest relationship between maker and object.

But look at this work with another set of references in mind and a different world opens up: the interlocking, vegetal patterns are also typical of Ottoman tilework; the frilled flowers hark back to Persian textiles; and the refusal of difference between art and design reverberates with a similar blurred distinction in the Islamic world. Though Morris never travelled to the Middle East, the patient curatorship of Bain and Khan shows the depth of his interest, both as a collector and a student of these crafts.

The exhibition takes place in the sizeable East London mansion that was Morris’s home as a teenager. The curators juxtapose various examples of Morris’s design with Persian and Ottoman objects that he and others in the UK collected, underlining both the prevalence of Middle Eastern design and the direct inspiration they furnished.

His well-known “flowerpot” motif, a repeating pattern of white vases opening onto bouquets with interlocking branches and stems, hangs next to a Damascene tile panel from the 17th century that Morris owned – whose white pot and arching branches are clear antecedents.

For the “dove and rose” pattern, made later in his life when he was experimenting with more lavish material, he looked to the use of animals in Iran and Italy, incorporating the beasts into the pattern woven into rich silk.

“You can see the influence even in the choice of flowers,” says Bain. “If you look at his 'medway' textile and wallpaper, it uses a smaller and freer type of tulip that would have been typical to Turkey at the time. It’s not a Dutch tulip but something more wild.”

Throughout, one can also see the genius of Morris’s originality: he was not creating mere copies, but continuations of the ideas behind the designs. The bright palette of the Iznik pottery is darkened for England's wintery clime, and he often dislodges Islamic art's symmetrical organisation and moves away from framing devices. It is cultural appreciation rather than appropriation, which is perhaps how it flew under the radar for so long.

A maker and a scholar

In his lifetime, Morris’s involvement in the arts of the Islamic world was well-known. He had a sizeable collection of metalwork, rugs and textiles from Persia and the Ottoman Empire, which he mixed in his own decor with European and British objects. He helped advise the South Kensington Museum – which later became the V&A – on its acquisitions of objects from the Middle East, including the Ardabil Carpet, now one of its standout items.

He used these objects and textiles not just for decoration but as objects of study, keeping them in drawers to look at their patterns and unpicking their needlework to learn how they were constructed. In the 1880s, when he began producing carpets, he turned to Persia and Turkey to understand their hand-knotted technique. And the show reveals his appreciation to be profound.

When Morris died, his coffin was covered with a textile from Ottoman Turkey in the 16th century – a beautiful velvet and silk brocade of smoky, elegant tulip-like forms reaching upwards. (This pall is a new discovery on the part of Bain and Khan.) The curators also include two books that Morris (along with other artists) illuminated in gilded, fantastical patterns – the Shahnameh and the Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam.

Morris’s daughter May, whose Islamic-inspired patterns are also in the exhibition, recalls listening to Morris read the newly published French translation of the Shahnameh at night to the family.

Like all groundbreaking exhibitions, William Morris and Art from the Islamic World opens more questions than it answers. Cultural revisionism has mostly focused on reinstating under-acknowledged artists and influences into the narrative of art history. But Morris has always been about more than art. He saw his works as embedded in society – not just because he created widely used items like furniture and wallpaper – but because he also looked to the economic and social framework that produces culture, which he viewed through his deeply rooted socialism.

While the curators gesture towards the larger legacy of Islamic design, particularly in the accompanying publication (Tulips and Peacocks: William Morris and Art from the Islamic World), it remains unclear how the public received these influences.

While this exhibition is a step in the right direction to understanding the point, more work needs to be done to appreciate the interlocking cultural histories whose legacy, in middle-class notebooks, throw cushions and the tiles of innumerable Victorian hallways, continues to form the UK’s visual landscape.

William Morris and Art from the Islamic World is at the William Morris Gallery in London until March 9