William Morris – Kennet, 1883 | Giclée Print

A slow diagonal of stems carrying big open flower heads and turning acanthus, laid over a second, much finer layer of leaves and little blossom that fills every gap. Two patterns in one cloth, one read at arm's length and one read from across the room — the thing Morris did better than anyone.

Named after a river. Between 1883 and 1885 Morris designed nine printed cottons and called each of them after a tributary of the Thames: Evenlode, Windrush, Kennet and Wey in 1883, then Loddon, Wandle and Cray, then Lea and Medway. He knew that river system from the boat journeys between his London house and Kelmscott Manor, and the names are not decoration — they mark the years when his patterns turned from flat repeats into something that moves like water. Kennet was registered on 18 October 1883.

What this is. A giclée reproduction, printed with pigment inks from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access photograph of a length of the printed cotton. Not the pattern redrawn in software, but this actual piece of cloth — the weave, the fraying, the selvedge and all. It is not a textile. It is a print on paper, and it is sold as one.

Scale
Original: a cut length of printed cotton, 90.2 × 97.8 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art
50 × 50 cm / 19.7 × 19.7 in — reduced, 0.43× original. Image 42.00 × 39.11 cm.
70 × 70 cm / 27.6 × 27.6 in — reduced, 0.60× original. Image 58.80 × 54.76 cm.

Why it is smaller than the cloth. The file is not the limit here. It carries 12,773 pixels across the width, enough to print the cloth at its true size and more. The sheet is the limit: at 1:1 the picture alone would be 98 cm wide and the paper would have to be about 117 cm. The largest square sheet we print is 70 cm, so the large sheet shows the cloth at 0.60× and the small one at 0.43×. Both have resolution to spare — 552 and 772 dpi against our floor of 300.

The cut edges stay in. A piece cut from a bolt, not a finished thing. Left and right are woven selvedges and run straight. Top and bottom were cut with shears and have frayed ever since, so the edge wanders and the museum's grey studio ground shows in the notches. We crop to the outermost thread on all four sides and straighten nothing.

Which measurement we trust. The two catalogued dimensions do not agree with each other by 0.9 % when they are laid over the file. We take the width as the anchor and say why: 97.8 cm is the loom width, selvedge to selvedge, and a loom does not vary. The 90.2 cm is the length of a hand-cut, fraying edge, and depends on where a tape is laid. Measured against the loom width, this piece stands 91.1 cm tall.

What the selvedge says. Along the left edge the firm's mark is printed into the cloth: «REGᵩ MORRIS & COMPANY 449 OXFORD STREET LONDON W». Cleveland dates the length to about 1920. Morris & Co. sold from 449 Oxford Street from 1882 and moved to 17 George Street, Hanover Square, in 1917. So either this cloth was printed before that move, or it was run from selvedge blocks that were already out of date. We print the museum's date and this reading side by side and leave the question open.

Margins. Small sheet: 4.00 cm at the sides, 5.06 above, 5.83 below. Large sheet: 5.60 at the sides, 7.09 above, 8.15 below. Optical centre, 1:1.15, not the middle of the paper.

Provenance
Designed by William Morris (British, 1834–1896), Kennet, registered 18 October 1883.
Plain weave cotton, printed. Merton Abbey, Surrey. 90.2 × 97.8 cm.
Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs Henry Chisholm, acc. no. 1937.698 (CMA object 117131); dated by the museum c. 1920.
Public domain. The museum publishes its photograph under CC0.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The colour of the museum's file is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

Further reading
Why This Print Is Not Bigger — what decides a size here, and why this one is a reduction.