William Morris Double Sided Bookmark Wild Tulip 1884

William Morris

^{Poet, Industrialist, Designer}

Wild Tulip, 1884 Double sided large bookmark with ribbon. 

The Arts and Crafts movement was an international trend in the decorative and fine arts that developed earliest and most fully in the British Isles and subsequently spread across the British Empire and to the rest of Europe and America.

The most well known designer of this time was William Morris, whose designs have become synonymous with the Victorian era. 

Morris designed forty-one wallpapers and five ceiling papers, working from 1862 with 'Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company' and from 1875 with 'Morris & Company' as sole owner.

A belief in beauty, imagination, and order shaped Morris's work and the popularity of his designs helped to raise British production standards in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The design was Wild Tulip, registered in 1884.

With their firm stems and variety of petals, tulips proved endlessly adaptable in Morris's patterns.  Smaler in scale than its showy, high bred cousins, the wild tulip is used in this pattern to form the mid-ground, over which larger peonies meander. 

May Morris wrote how the character of this design was 'all "Kelmscott" to me: the peony and the wild tulip are two of the richest blossomings of the spring garden at the Manor'.

_{Bain, Rowan. William Morris's Flowers. Thames & Hudson V&A Publishing, 2019.}

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