Wild Tulip

William Morris

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Inspired by seventeenth-century Turkish brocades, the clarity of this wallpaper design is typical of Morris's late style. The pattern features tulips and stylized carnations or peonies, intertwined in a repeating meander. A leader of the Arts and Crafts movement in England, Morris used Moorish, Turkish, Persian, medieval, and Byzantine sources for his furniture, carpets, textiles, and papers. Over his long career, he produced forty-one wallpapers and five ceiling papers, printed by hand with wood blocks, which distinguished them from mass-produced products. Tulips were unknown in Europe until the sixteenth century. Originating as wildflowers indigenous to western Anatolia and eastern Persia, they were first brought to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I in bulb form by an ambassador who had encountered them in the Ottoman court of Süleyman I. The English word tulip derives from the Perisan dulband and the Turkish tulbant (turban).

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art