Price: £650 | $880 | €750
Ref N°: 9227
The leafy curving meander, two to each panel, filled with a variety of flowers including daffodils, roses, peonies, tulips and carnations, in a polychrome palette, all on a natural cotton ground, the selvedges with Liberty & Co, Regent Street, London. W. Registered.
Two widths are joined but could be seperated.
51 x.71 in; 130 x 180 cm
The left hand panel has one small area of dark brown stain approximately 3 x 4 cm, with a few markings nearby.
Dye, Print, Stitch. Textiles by Thomas and Elizabeth Wardle. Brenda King. p 40/41
*King, Brenda M Silk and empire p 148
Liberty's 1875-1975 1975 Victoria & Albert Museum exhibition catalogue p 37 no C11A HMSO ISBN 0901486892
Morris, Barbara Liberty Design p 57, 1989 Pyramid. ISBN 1871307716
All images and text © meg-andrews.com 2026
Thomas Wardle of Leek produced embroidery kits for amateur embroiderers. The cotton ground was hand block printed with a single colour outline and supplied with Art Silk skeins, which Wardle had specially dyed in beautiful vegetable and mineral shades. This design was based on 17th century diagonal meander silk and velvet textiles, but it is unknown who the designer was.
It has recently come to me that the designer was possibly William Morris with whom Thomas Wardle had a close business relationship. Stems or branches following a diagonal axis or were placed within a network of diamond-shaped structures* Surely the diagonal branches design we have here, is similar to many of Morris' textile designs such as Florence, Medway, Cray etc. Morris supplied Wardle with fourteen designs for printed textiles during the period 1875-1878, but to my knowledge these have not been identified.
This piece has Liberty's & Co on the selvedges, so clearly was being sold there, but Wardle also sold similar kits in his shop at 71 New Bond Street and at Morris & Company in Oxford Street.
It is nice to see some of the original hand blocked design un-embroidered on the edges. This was clearly a longer piece, possibly for a curtain, with two widths joined and embroidered over the seam.
Liberty's 1875-1975 it states that Liberty's greatest triumph in those early days came from a co-operation with Thomas Wardle, the dyer and printer of Leek in Staffordshire, who also printed fabrics for William Morris, but also taught him to dye. Between them, Liberty and Wardle introduced dyes which had until then been supposed to be a closely guarded secret of the East....delicate pastel tints which they called 'Art Colours' that were described all over the world as 'Liberty colours.' Silks in Liberty colours were an influential element in the Aesthetic Movement. Liberty's windows became one of the sites of Regent Street...a revelation to a generation accustomed to the harsh colours of aniline dyes....
Read about Thomas Wardle and The Leek Embroidery Society in my ARTICLES
From the collection of the late Brenda King.