Rare William Morris and John Henry Dearle Textile Sample, Authentic & Rare with Provenance

This is a rare and wonderful small sample of a John Henry Dearle pattern called “Daffodil” for William Morris. It was first registered in 1891. 

This printing dates to circa 1905 due to provenance.
 

This exquisite William Morris textile is in magnificent condition, overall. 

The colors are vivid. The fabric is strong. There are no holes or problems of any kind. It is hemmed by both hand as well as machine on two sides and a one side is pieced together. 

It was a sample textile offered to potential clients from the William Morris company from the turn of the last century. It was used by customers so that they could choose their colors and style of fabrics and wallpaper from the comfort of their home.

This exquisite fabric sample that is over a century old, was carefully stored away for decades and has never been on the open market prior to now. 

This textile sample comes from the estate of Peter Hansen, designer to Gustav Stickley. Indeed, this is authentic and not a reproduction.

This textile comes to us from the direct descendant of the Peter Hansen estate. Peter Hansen was the furniture designer for Gustav Stickley. His wife, Ruth, was an artist and also worked as a draftsman for Stickley. 

The provenance is that the samples were first gathered by Peter and his wife when they decorated their home in upstate New York. This was during the time when they worked for Stickley, sometime around 1905. 

The remainder of the Morris collection may be seen online at the Cranbrook Art Museum, located in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. That particular donation consisted of the many rare William Morris wallpaper samples and all came from this very same estate. The items listed here on The Gilded Griffin are the textiles that were not donated to the Museum, but items that remained in Mrs. Hansen’s possession until her passing. 

The Morris wallpaper samples are discussed in the Cranbrook Art Museum blog, dated October 3, 2014. The author of the entry is Shelley Selim, 2013-2015 Jeanne and Ralph Graham Collections Fellow. She writes: 

“Cranbrook Art Museum holds seventy-two wallpaper samples in its collection, which were donated by Mrs. Olive Hansen in 1991. Peter Heinrich Hansen, Mrs. Hansen’s father-in-law, was a German immigrant who in 1904 was hired as a designer-draftsman by none other than Gustav Stickley, one of the American Craftsman style’s greatest furniture makers (and like Morris, an ardent socialist). When Hansen and his wife, Ruth, who herself worked for Stickley as an architectural draftsman, were redecorating their home in upstate New York, they ordered wallpaper samples of every pattern made by Morris & Company–the design firm founded by William Morris–and never threw them away. 

You can read more about the design, implementation, and social context of William Morris’s wallpapers on the Victoria and Albert Museum website. And for more on Morris’s influence on George Booth and the foundation of Cranbrook, you can check out this great gallery guide written by a former Art Museum fellow, which I’ve scanned and uploaded here.” 

On occasion, early William Morris yardage and samples such as these come to auction at such fine auction houses such as Christie’s or Bonhams and are found displayed in the world’s greatest museums. 

These are obviously historic and important textiles and they are destined for discerning private or museum collections. 

There are four William Morris textiles from the Hansen estate being offered here at The Gilded Griffin. The provenance and records come from the files of the two local ASA appraisers who handled Mrs. Hansen's estate.

This century old textile sample measures 11.75 inches or 29.84 cm in length as well as width.  There is simply nothing like the colors and brilliance in this fine William Morris textile.