Product
Description
THE ART OF MAY MORRIS -Liberty Tana Lawn® celebrates the pioneering vision of designer, embroiderer, and craftswoman, May Morris. A leading figure of the Arts and Crafts movement and daughter of legendary designer William Morris, May grew up steeped in the ethos of excellent craftsmanship and innovative design. Best known for her intricate embroidery style, May led the revival of needlework as an art form in the world of craft and was later recognised for her enticing wallpaper prints and jeweller designs. Inspired by medieval artifacts and the natural world, her work is distinguished by her organic, flowing forms. Stylised flowers and foliage exuberantly curl across May’s designs, interwoven with gothic-script quotations from ancient and modern verse, alongside silk-winged birds in flight.
Created as part of Liberty’s ongoing creative partnership with William Morris Gallery, The Art of May Morris sheds a new light on her artistic influence as a working female designer. Each design in the collection draws direct inspiration from May’s original works held in the WMG archive, reinterpreting her lighter, more fluid aesthetic that set her apart from her father’s structured compositions. Honouring both her creativity and technical prowess, the series reflects the symmetry, movement, and grace that characterised May’s designs, exhibiting the qualities that played a pivotal role in defining Liberty’s early artistic identity and continue to define the design house’s enduring heritage.
Carnation Vine
The Liberty design studio brought this artwork to life by carefully assembling floral motifs extracted from May Morris’ ink and pencil sketches, originally created as studies for seat cover embroideries. Dating from the early 1900s, Carnation Vine’s romantic pattern blooms anew as its delicately sketched flowers are infused with colour. Rendered in a subtle ornamental style, vibrant tulips, carnations, primroses, buttercups, and bellflowers were hand-drawn with soft, coloured pencil strokes and woven into flowing trails of scrolling foliage