Evenlode

Textiles designed by William Morris are some of the most recognizable of all nineteenth-century designs. Morris, driven by both perfectionism and aesthetic vision, laid the groundwork for the rejection of mass production and the revival of the idea of the artist as designer. Morris and Co. was founded in 1874 and, by the early 1880s, William Morris was one of the most important individuals in English decorative arts. Before the late 1880s, he produced more than 600 designs for wallpaper, embroideries, tapestries, rugs, and woven and printed furnishing fabrics, and trained himself in all related techniques.

Morris’s passionate desire was to master the dye process and its application to textile printing. Of all the printing techniques developed at his dyeworks, Merton Abbey, the most important was indigo discharge, a complex process that involved not only printing dye colors but resists and discharges as well. "Evenlode," designed in 1883, was a pattern derived from Persian and seventeenth-century Italian velvets and is a masterpiece of indigo discharge. The printing of this pattern involved the use of thirty-three different printing blocks. The dark green background alone required dyeing the cloth blue and overprinting with a strong yellow. The floral pattern is a complex series of printing resists, which kept dye from penetrating the fabric; printing dye, which gave the fabric color; and discharges, which lifted color out of the fabric.