Britain · England / 1883
Strawberry Thief textile
Beauty, at what price?
A reproduction of the 1883 printed textile design. Colour and scale in the digital file may differ from the original cloth.
Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons at a 1600px rendering; converted to a JPEG working master and a WebP reading copy, maximum 1400px, quality 80; no content retouching.
Birds among curling plants seem far from the factory or political meeting. Yet William Morris's 1883 Strawberry Thief opens a question central to socialist design: who gets to live with well-made, beautiful things? The textile used a demanding indigo-discharge printing process and became commercially successful despite its cost. Morris's later socialist activity sharpened the tension between the labour-intensive goods his firm sold and the wider access to art he wanted. This is a British movement history, distinct from the consumer industries of socialist states.
- Date
- 1883
- Maker / designer
- William Morris; Morris & Co.
- Material
- Block-printed cotton; indigo discharge process
- Context
- British socialist and Arts and Crafts movement history, not a communist-state product.
Evidence: Date established · Place established
Historical record
- Designed in 1883 and made using indigo-discharge printing.
- Morris became active in socialist organisations during the 1880s.