Strawberry Thief (c 1936): Art, History and Details

Strawberry Thief (c 1936) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is William Morris (British, 1834–1896).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Perhaps the most recognizable of Morris’s textiles, Strawberry Thief celebrates the thrushes in Kelmscott Manor’s garden. May Morris remarked, “You can picture my Father going out in the early morning and watching the rascally thrushes at work on the fruit beds and telling the gardener who growls, ‘I’d like to wring their necks!’ that no bird in the garden must be touched.” With Strawberry Thief, Morris perfected the indigo-discharge process, which required the entire cloth to be dyed blue before it was bleached and block printed, in this case with more colors than any of his other textiles.

Object facts

• Title: Strawberry Thief
• Date: c 1936
• Creator attribution: William Morris (British, 1834–1896)
• Culture: England, Merton Abbey, 20th century
• Type: Textile
• Technique: plain weave cotton, discharge printed
• Dimensions: Overall: 88.3 x 99.1 cm (34 3/4 x 39 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1937.696

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Henry Chisholm

Further reading listed by the museum

• Parry, Linda. William Morris Textiles. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983.
• Lemonedes, Heather. “Imaging the Garden: The garden is a ground plot for the mind. —Thomas Hill, The Gardener’s Labyrinth (1577).” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 55, no. 6 (November/December 2015): 4-6.
• Korkow, Cory. "Textiles." IN William Morris: Designing an Earthly Paradise. Cory Korkow and Victoria Hepburn, 8-23. Cleveland, Ohio : Cleveland Museum of Art, 2017.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.