This drawing is a preliminary small-scale finished drawing for an embroidered panel ‘The Orchard’. An article in the Century Guild’s publication ‘Hobby Horse’ Vol. 3 1888 refers to May Morris having just completed the finished embroidery as a pair of curtains. ‘The Orchard’ became one of May Morris’s most popular designs. The Day book of the embroidery section of Morris & Co. which runs from 1892 – 96 (now in the V&A Museum) lists five versions made in 1893 alone. The panels were made as portieres each taking about fourteen and a half weeks work and cost £48 when sold fully completed.
The finished embroideries included an inscription on scrolls across two panels (both panels identical in design) of a poem by William Morris ‘The Flowering Orchard’, specifically written for the silk embroidery and referred to in the 1888 Hobby Horse. The poem, as with several other verses he compiled for various tapestries/embroideries, was published in ‘Poems by the Way’ in 1891. The lines read:
‘Lo, silken my garden & silken my sky,
And silken the apple boughs hanging on high,
All wrought by the worm in the peasant carle’s cot
On the mulberry leafage when summer was hot.’
Another version showing a single panel is similarly inscribed with lines:
‘Lo waneth the summer, the apple boughs fade
Yet fair still my garden ‘twixt sunlight & shade’.
A finished version embroidered by Theodosia Middlemore in 1894 is on the Victoria & Albert Museum: Circ.206-1964.
