Floral

Floral posters: pattern or specimen

William Morris designed for wallpaper and textile, so his flowers are built to repeat — the pattern never resolves into a single subject, which is why it orders a room instead of decorating it.

The other family is the opposite: a single stem, a cut-out, a flower drawn once. Matisse's late paper works and Kusama's flowers sit at the modern end of that tradition, where the plant is simplified until it is close to a sign.

What is in this collection

• William Morris — pimpernel, blackthorn, snakeshead, cray.
• Matisse — colour cut free of the drawing.
• Kusama — flowers built out of dots.
• Braque — the modern still life with a plant in it.

Two traditions, one subject

The botanical plate was a scientific document: one plant, drawn accurately, labelled. The pattern was commercial: a flower simplified until it could be printed a thousand times and still look right on a wall.

What both share is discipline — the plate because it has to be true, the pattern because it has to repeat. Neither is sentimental, and that is why floral prints work in rooms that would reject a bunch of flowers as decoration.

Which one goes where

Pattern belongs in rooms with a lot of surface: a hallway, a dining room, a bedroom above a bed. It fills a wall without needing a second picture, and it survives being partly hidden by furniture.

A specimen or a cut-out needs air. One flower on a white wall at 50×70 cm does more than three small prints together, and it looks best beside a plain surface — wood, plaster, linen.

For the Japanese version of the specimen idea, see Japanese; for the quietest option, minimal.

The darker end of the collection is worth a second look. The Blackthorn pattern, white blossom and small red fruit over a near-black ground, reads as texture from across a room and as drawing up close, and it is the Morris here that suits a hallway or a study better than a bedroom. The Vuillard sheet, a loose garden sketch in pale green with a figure in a pink dress on a cream ground, does the opposite: it keeps the flowers at a distance and puts a person in the middle of them.

Sizes, paper and delivery

Pigment print on 210 gsm Hahnemühle paper, sizes from 30×40 to 70×100 cm plus A3 and A2. Frame not included. Orders leave within 24 hours and arrive in 3–5 working days inside the EU, in a tracked tube.