The Tree of Life design sold everywhere as a William Morris was almost certainly not designed by William Morris. It is the work of John Henry Dearle, woven around 1910 from an embroidered wool portière — fourteen years after Morris died.
That is not a technicality, and it is not an obscure quibble. Dearle was a real designer with a substantial body of work, and the habit of putting Morris's name on everything Morris & Co. ever produced has quietly erased him. If you are drawn to the Tree of Life, it is worth knowing whose eye you are actually admiring.
Who designed the Tree of Life
John Henry Dearle (1860–1932) joined Morris & Co. as a teenage shop assistant and was trained by Morris himself. He rose to become the firm's chief designer by around 1890, took over as Art Director after Morris's death in 1896, and became its principal stained glass designer after Edward Burne-Jones died in 1898.
Some sources credit the Tree of Life jointly to Morris and Dearle, which is fair enough — Dearle was working within a house style Morris created, and the two men worked closely for years. But the design itself belongs to the period after Morris was gone, and the dense, flowing foliage, the curling acanthus and the birds worked into the branches are recognizably Dearle's hand rather than Morris's.
William Morris died in 1896. Any Morris & Co. design dated after that is by someone else, most often Dearle.
Who William Morris actually was
Morris (1834–1896) was a designer, a poet, a printer, a translator and a committed socialist, and he was serious about all of it at once.
He went up to Oxford intending to take holy orders, and so did his friend Edward Burne-Jones. A journey through northern France and Belgium, looking at medieval cathedrals, changed both their minds. They decided to make things instead.
In April 1861 Morris founded the decorative arts firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Philip Webb, Ford Madox Brown, Charles Faulkner and Peter Paul Marshall. The immediate cause was practical: he had built Red House and could not buy furnishings he was willing to live with. The firm was later reorganized as Morris & Co.
He married Jane Burden, whom Rossetti and Burne-Jones had spotted at a theatre in Oxford and recruited as a model. They had two daughters, Jenny and May — May became a significant designer and embroiderer in her own right. His friends called him Topsy, after the character in Uncle Tom's Cabin.
He travelled to Iceland in 1871 with Charles Faulkner and Eiríkr Magnússon, and what he saw of how people lived there sharpened his politics considerably. He founded the Socialist League in 1884 and was arrested at a free-speech demonstration the following year. His most quoted line is a refusal of the idea that beauty belongs to the wealthy: "I do not want art for a few" — and, he went on, no more did he want education or freedom for a few. It comes from a lecture given in 1877.
In 1891 he founded the Kelmscott Press, designing the Golden, Troy and Chaucer typefaces and producing some of the most beautiful printed books ever made in England. He died five years later, at 62.
The Tree of Life as a motif
Trees carrying meaning is not a Morris & Co. invention. Versions of a sacred or world-spanning tree appear across a great many unrelated cultures, and the motif is genuinely ancient.
What is worth being careful about is the confident chronology you find online — a specific oldest example at a specific site at a specific date, spreading outward from there. That story is repeated a great deal and is not well supported. The honest version is simpler: trees as symbols of growth, continuity and connection between generations recur independently in many places, which is probably why the image still works.
Dearle's design belongs to a much more particular tradition: the medieval verdure tapestry, dense with foliage and birds, which Morris & Co. studied closely and revived.
Why Morris designs make poor paint by numbers
This is the part nobody says, and it explains why you will struggle to find a good one.
Paint by numbers works by reducing an image to flat areas of a single color, and it works best when the picture has a clear structure of large shapes with a few small details. A landscape has a sky, a lake, a treeline — big regions that fill satisfyingly.
A Morris or Dearle pattern is the opposite. It is a flat repeating design with almost no tonal modeling, built from hundreds of small leaves and stems of similar size, all at the same visual weight, none of them larger than a fingernail. Converted to a numbered canvas that becomes a field of tiny, near-identical sections with no broad areas at all — hundreds of hours of fiddly work with none of the moments of visible progress that make the format enjoyable.
Where the format shines is a painting with depth: light falling across something, a foreground and a distance, contrast between large regions. Pattern is beautiful and it is the wrong shape for this particular activity.
What we do and do not sell
We do not make a William Morris or Tree of Life kit, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. If you have landed here looking for one, we do not have it.
What we do make is 39 licensed designs from working artists — landscapes, wildlife, cabins, florals and seasonal scenes, at 12 x 16 framed, 16 x 20 framed and 16 x 20 unframed.
If it is the botanical quality of Morris and Dearle that appeals to you, the nearest thing in our catalog is the floral work, much of it by Judy Buswell: Rita's Pansies, Sweet Petunias, Cosmos from the Garden and Morning Glory. They are paintings rather than patterns, so they have the light and depth that a numbered canvas needs, while still being densely, generously full of flowers. Worth knowing that Sweet Petunias is one of our more demanding designs.
You can see all of them in the kit collection, and every licensed artist has a page on our artists page.
If what you want is a specific image that we do not stock, a custom canvas from your own photo is the other route — though the same caution applies. Flat repeating pattern converts poorly. A photograph with clear light and a definite subject converts well.
Where to see the real thing
Morris and Dearle are best appreciated at the size and in the material they were designed for. The William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, London, holds a large collection, and the Victoria and Albert Museum has substantial Morris & Co. holdings including textiles, wallpapers and stained glass.
Morris's work is out of copyright, and Dearle died in 1932, so images of both circulate freely. That is also why the name gets attached so casually to so much — and why it is worth checking who actually drew the thing you like.
