Abstract: The pictorial tapestries produced by William Morris’s decorating firm Morris & Company at the end of the nineteenth century belong to the most spectacular, yet expensive handmade textiles to emerge from the British Arts and Crafts Movement. In spite of Morris’s socialist convictions, they decorated the homes of the wealthiest members of late Victorian and Edwardian society. This article centres on the ‘Greenery’ tapestry, a verdure panel commissioned for Clouds House in Wiltshire and designed by John Henry Dearle for Morris & Co. in 1892. Critically scrutinising the aesthetic and social implications of Morris’s understanding of tapestry as “the noblest of the weaving arts”, the article approaches the two existing weavings of ‘Greenery’ as artworks and products of material culture. The aim of this extended analysis is to disentangle the versatile conceptions of wealth and abundance encoded in these textiles. Abundance, in the context of ‘Greenery’, denotes not only the complexity of Dearle’s tapestry design – in regard to its ecological theme, use of fabric, and visual aesthetics – but also the monetary capital and exclusivist consumer habits of the upper classes that enabled the production of these luxury objects in the first place. Drawing on a viewing of the 1915 weaving of ‘Greenery’ held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on cultural histories of Clouds House and further archival material, the article situates ‘Greenery’ within its changing contexts, which include the late Victorian aristocracy’s romanticised attitudes to art, land, and ownership, but also the decline of aristocratic wealth, and the reconfiguration of the tapestries as museal artefacts. Both the history of Clouds House and the provenance of ‘Greenery’ exemplify that conceptions of wealth and interior decoration are inextricably tied to changing social, economic, and ideological circumstances.

Keywords: tapestry, William Morris, textiles, Victorian material culture, abundance