Poppies is a floral built on the bones of a damask. The blooms are blousy and open, the leaves ruffled and deeply cut, but underneath the profusion there is a formal ogee structure holding everything in place, which is why a pattern this full never looks disordered on a wall.
It comes from the archive with much of its original drawing intact, and the period shows in the way the flowers are described: outlined, layered, modelled with hatching rather than with light, in the manner of a hand-blocked paper rather than a photographic one. The 52 cm repeat is moderate for a design of this scale, which means the structure declares itself quickly and the room reads as pattern rather than as scene.
With a straight match on a 0.52 m roll it hangs conventionally and calculates simply. Rooms with some formality to answer suit it, a drawing room with mouldings, a principal bedroom, a dining room with dark furniture, and it takes a plain generous curtain far better than a competing print. Its colourways run from soft and faded to full and saturated, which alters its temperature considerably. Rolls run to 10 m, generally enough for a good-sized room with a single wall of windows.
