'Snakeshead' printed cotton

In the 1870s when William Morris started designing printed textiles, he was frequently in Leek, a small industrial town in Staffordshire and a key location for silk dyeing. Here Morris had persuaded Thomas Wardle, the brother-in-law of Morris & Co.’s showroom manager George Wardle, to assist him in large-scale dyeing experiments. Although Wardle’s father and grandfather used natural dyes, by Wardle’s time modern chemical dyes had replaced these more ancient techniques.

Morris had already been experimenting with vegetable dyes in the basement of his London home in Queen’s Square. At Leek he was able to scale-up these experiments and attempt to perfect more difficult dyes, such as indigo. During this period his hands were "habitually and unwashably blue" from time spent in the expansive indigo dye vats. Both Morris and Wardle admired the rich colours of Indian printed fabrics, which were still produced with natural dyestuffs as the British had restricted the export of chemical dyes to India, inadvertently protecting the use of natural dyes.

This pattern was designed by Morris at the height of his collaboration with Wardle where he would spend weeks at a time in Leek. The design is named after the snake's head fritillaries it features, a flower commonly found in English meadows and mentioned in John Gerard’s ‘Herball', or ‘Generall Historie of Plants’, which also included a lot of useful details about the dye properties of different plants. The rich colours of this design demonstrate the wide aray of bright tones that could be achieved with natural dyes. As well as indigo for the deep purple and blue shades, Morris used a plant called wild mignonette to create a yellow dye called ‘weld’ that had been in use since classical times. Red dyes could be produced from the roots of madder plants, another ancient dyestuff that has been used in India for over 4,000 years. With the addition of a brown dye produced from the walnut husks, Morris was able to create all the colours he needed for his printed textiles.