'Nature supplied the mediaeval artists with all their forms and ideas; the same inexhaustible source is open to us.’
So wrote Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin in 1849, in the preface to his Floriated Ornament. The Floriated Ornament was a volume that sought to teach Victorian designers how to view the world through the eyes of medieval craftsmen. Why medieval craftsmen? Pugin was calling to his reader to become more rooted in the natural world, to keep an eye out for the flora and fauna and how they might inspire us, as they had done for our medieval predecessors. He was articulating a theology of design: that the created world, properly observed and honestly rendered, could become a conduit for divine meaning. It is this conviction that runs through three of our most enduring patterns in the Watts & Co. collection: the 'Bellini' silk damask, the 'Shrewsbury' silk damask, and the 'Pugin Gothic' Tapestry. Each, a meditation on how mortal hands might weave the eternal, is a distinct stage in Pugin's own evolution as a designer as well as a timely reminder to look back at history as a means of moving forward.
The Bellini
The ‘Bellini’ takes its name from Giovanni Bellini, the 16th-century Venetian master. Pugin re-drew the pattern from a hanging depicted in Rogier van der Weyden's Medici Madonna and the Saints, a Northern Renaissance panel in which the Virgin is enthroned beneath a canopy of brocaded silk. Here, in the painted folds of a 15th-century curtain, Pugin found a pattern he believed could be reimagined through modern eyes.
'Bellini' Silk Damask in Comper Rose & Gold
The eye is drawn into a rhythm of repeating forms, a geometric containment of natural exuberance that mirrors the medieval understanding of creation: ordered and harmonious. Pugin’s first designs are saturated with this symbolic meaning, to be seen in the V&A Museum's collection.
Cope of brocaded silk and woven silk braid, designed by A.W.N. Pugin, made in England, ca. 1848. Courtesy of the V&A.
The pattern was originally designed for Abney Hall, situated in Cheadle, Cheshire. The Hall was built in 1847 for Alfred Orrell, a cotton-mill owner, before being bought by James Watts, a Manchester merchant and mayor, upon Orrell’s death. It is Watts who Pugin created the design for. These designs for Abney Hall are amongst Pugin's last. He suffered from poor health at this time and died later that year; the designs themselves seem to have been executed at speed, with a slightly shaky hand.
Design on squared paper for wallpaper with pineapple motif for Abney Hall; A.W.N. Pugin, 1852. Courtesy of the V&A.
Though initially shaky in execution, the design has remained significant, becoming one of our most popular patterns. Woven now in pure silk, the ‘Bellini’ is available too in a gilt version, where the thread itself catches the light like the gold ground of an icon panel, reminding us that the earthly and the heavenly are never truly separate.
This is Pugin at his most archaeological. The ‘Bellini’ represents a young designer — he was in his mid-thirties when he published Floriated Ornament — still learning to read the past, extracting and translating patterns from paintings and manuscripts, believing that the medieval mind had already solved the problem of ornament, and that his task was merely to make its solutions visible again.
The Shrewsbury
The ‘Shrewsbury’ silk damask, created around 1845, marks a decisive shift. Here, Pugin moves from re-drawing to composing. Commissioned by John Talbot, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, for his Jacobean mansion at Ingestre Hall, the design places stylised daffodils beneath ogee arches, those sinuous pointed forms that Pugin loved for their structural honesty and their spiritual upward reach.
Shrewbury Silk Damask in Bellini Green
The daffodil is not merely decorative. In Pugin's symbolic vocabulary, it speaks of spring, of resurrection, of the mortal made glorious. The Earl of Shrewsbury was among Pugin's most important Catholic patrons, and the design formed part of the portfolio submitted for the redecoration of the royal apartments in the Palace of Westminster — Pugin’s great secular commission, where he laboured under Charles Barry to give the new Houses of Parliament an interior language that spoke in the Latin of its medieval lineage. One can imagine the fabric catching the light of the Thames through Gothic windows, the daffodils repeating in their geometric rhythm like a visual Gloria, each bloom a small affirmation that even in the machinery of government, the sacred might be present.
The ogee arch, too, carries its theology. Unlike the classical round arch, which Pugin condemned in his 1836 polemic Contrasts as being pagan and, thus, spiritually dead, the pointed arch reaches above base mortality and looks up to the heavens of Christianity. Consequently, it was the view of Pugin that the pointed arch acknowledges that the earthly is always aspiring towards the heavenly, a point neatly made in the luxury of the ‘Shrewsbury’s’ damask silk.
Where the ‘Bellini’ had been an act of recovery, the ‘Shrewsbury’ is an act of creation in the medieval spirit. Pugin is no longer copying van der Weyden; he is thinking like the master weaver who might have supplied the Medici Madonna's canopy. The daffodil is his own botanical observation, disciplined by the same geometric logic he had learned from the 15th century. The pattern is bolder — more confident and distinctly his.
The Pugin Gothic Tapestry
'Pugin Gothic' Tapestry
The ‘Pugin Gothic’ Tapestry moves the theological register from aspiration to sacrifice, and in doing so represents the fullest synthesis of Pugin's mature style. Originally designed for a cope at St Augustine's Abbey in Ramsgate — Pugin’s own church, built with his own hands and his own diminishing fortune, discussed in an earlier blog here. The pattern centres on two botanical emblems: the pomegranate and the thistle.
Cope and hood of woven wool and embroidered silks, designed by A.W.N. Pugin, England, ca. 1848. Courtesy of the V&A.
The pomegranate, with its jewelled seeds bursting from the rind, has long signified fruitfulness, eternal life, and the Passion of Christ. In the Old Testament, it adorned the hem of the high priest's robe; in the New, it became a figure for the Church, many-chambered and abundant. The thistle, by contrast, speaks of the crucifixion itself, the crown of thorns pressed into Christ's brow, the prickly nature of the plant made into an instrument of suffering. The design is indebted to 15th-century textiles in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and one can trace in its bold, heraldic forms the same visual logic that governs the Bellini: a pattern drawn from history, but made present through the loom.
Panel of velvet. Italian, second half 15th Century. Courtesy of the Met Museum.
Yet here, the historical reference is absorbed so fully into Pugin's own vocabulary that it becomes almost invisible. The pomegranate and thistle are not quoted from a specific painting, instead, they are deployed with the freedom of a designer who has internalised the medieval method. The pattern is denser, more hieratic, more insistently symbolic than the Shrewsbury. Where the damask invites the eye to wander in its repeating rhythm, the tapestry commands attention. It is a vestment, not a wall covering and the symbolism is pointed in its identity as belonging to the body of a priest.
A.W.N. Pugin, wallpaper or textile design for House of Parliament, ca. 1850. Courtesy of the V&A.
The tapestry's afterlife is itself a kind of resurrection. From a monastic cope in Ramsgate, it passed into a cope worn by the Archbishop of Canterbury for the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales: a trajectory from the cloister to the cathedral, as if the pattern itself refused to be confined by the denominational boundaries that so troubled Pugin's own age.
The wedding of the Prince & Princess of Wales, 2011.
The Dichotomy of the Loom
The three fabrics trace an arc across Pugin's working life, from the ‘Bellini’, where he learns to read the past with the humility of a student; to the ‘Shrewsbury’, where he begins to speak in his own voice within the medieval idiom; to the ‘Pugin Gothic’ Tapestry, where the idiom has become so internalised that the design seems to have emerged from the 15th century itself, fully formed and waiting. The ‘Bellini’ looks backwards, re-drawing the Renaissance so that it might address the Victorian present. The ‘Shrewsbury’ looks upwards, its daffodils and ogee arches aspiring towards the divine. The ‘Pugin Gothic’ Tapestry looks inwards, to the suffering and fruitfulness of the Passion. Yet all three are woven on the same loom, made by the same hands, available to the same churches and houses that wish to drape themselves in continuity.
Watts & Co., founded in 1874 by architects who had breathed Pugin's air, continues to weave these patterns in England. They are not reproductions. They are continuations, the same inexhaustible source made available to us, as Pugin promised it would be.
And so, when a person orders a length of ‘Bellini’ or ‘Shrewsbury’ or ‘Pugin Gothic’ Tapestry, they are not merely buying fabric. One is entering into a conversation that began in a 15th-century painting, passed through the fevered pencil of a 19th-century convert, and arrives now, in the weave of the loom, as a reminder that the mortal and the divine have never been separate.
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