Pattern in art is a motif repeated in an organized way across a surface, like the tiles of a wall, the dots of a dress or the flowers of a curtain. What separates it from simple repetition is that the copies are arranged to fill the whole space. The work where it shows best is William Morris's Strawberry Thief, a printed cotton designed in 1883 and kept at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Thrushes, strawberries and flowers are printed against a dark blue ground. The birds come from Morris's own kitchen garden at Kelmscott Manor, where thrushes really did steal the strawberries. The cloth was meant for curtains or to be draped around walls, and it became a firm favorite with the clients of Morris and Company.
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Every pattern is a copy, and Morris knew it. On 10 December 1881, two years before he drew the thrushes, he gave a lecture at the Working Men's College in London on how a pattern should be built. The designer, he told his audience, must mask the construction of the pattern enough to prevent people from counting the repeats, while lulling their curiosity to trace it out.
The goal was what he called a look of satisfying mystery, which he held to be essential in all patterned goods. A pattern succeeds, in other words, when the eye cannot catch the repetition that makes it a pattern.
That raises a puzzle. If the best patterns hide their own repetition, what is a pattern in the first place? The first answer sits in the word itself.
What did the word pattern first mean?
It meant a model to copy. Pattern began as a variant of patron, which also meant a model to imitate, and for centuries the two words were hard to tell apart…
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