ABSTRACT
Like textiles, wallpapers were an essential part of the nineteenth century interior. Machine-printing from the 1840s made the products widely available, but they were often printed in varieties of historical styles or attempts at realistic imagery. The most well-known designer was William Morris whose work is typically located between the many three-dimensional patterns popular in the mid-century and the geometrical abstraction of many patterns produced by design reformers. Morris’s version of abstraction was based on close analysis of common plants that were then adapted to the flat surface of the wallpaper. Although Morris was the most influential, Walter Crane was a close second. Crane later wrote about his own wallpaper designs and explained something of the evolution of designs.
