William Morris – Strawberry Thief, 1883 | Giclée Print

Four thrushes, in two facing pairs, caught in the act. Morris watched the birds stealing fruit in the kitchen garden at Kelmscott Manor and put them into a pattern where they meet beak to beak under strawberry runners and turning acanthus, on a ground of indigo so dark it reads almost black until you stand close to it.

The technique is the point. Morris spent years trying to print by the indigo-discharge method: dye the whole cloth blue first, then bleach the pattern back out of it with a discharge paste and block the reds and yellows into the cleared ground. He failed at it in 1875 and only got it right after he moved his works to Merton Abbey in 1881. Strawberry Thief, registered in 1883, is what the method could finally do. The colour sits in the cloth rather than on it, which is why the blue has not shifted in a century and a half and the whites have gone the colour of old paper.

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, 88.3 × 99.1 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art
50 × 50 cm / 19.7 × 19.7 in — reduced, 0.42× original. Image 42.00 × 37.47 cm.
70 × 70 cm / 27.6 × 27.6 in — reduced, 0.59× original. Image 58.80 × 52.45 cm.

Why it is smaller than the cloth. The file is not the limit here. It carries 13,063 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 99 cm wide and the paper would have to be about 118 cm. The largest square sheet we print is 70 cm, so the large sheet shows the cloth at 0.59× and the small one at 0.42×. Both sheets have resolution to spare — 564 and 790 dpi against our floor of 300.

The cut edges stay in. This is 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 been fraying ever since: the edge wanders by up to nineteen millimetres, and where it falls back, the museum's grey studio ground shows in the notches. We crop to the outermost thread on all four sides. One loose weft at the bottom hangs nine millimetres below everything else, and it is in the picture. Nothing is straightened, nothing is filled in.

A date that does not add up. Cleveland catalogues this length as about 1936. Along the right-hand selvedge the firm's own mark is printed, and the cut has taken the beginning of it away, so what survives reads «…MPANY 449 OXFORD STREET LONDON W». Morris & Co. sold from 449 Oxford Street from 1882 and moved to 17 George Street, Hanover Square, in 1917. So either the cloth was printed before that move, or it was run from blocks and selvedge marks 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, 5.83 above, 6.71 below. Large sheet: 5.60 at the sides, 8.16 above, 9.39 below. Optical centre, 1:1.15, not the middle of the paper.

Provenance
Designed by William Morris (British, 1834–1896), Strawberry Thief, registered 1883.
Plain weave cotton, discharge printed. Merton Abbey, Surrey. 88.3 × 99.1 cm.
Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs Henry Chisholm, acc. no. 1937.696 (CMA object 117129); dated by the museum c. 1936.
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.