06/14/2026
It's called Leicester — the folding acanthus leaves, the small flowers tucked underneath. It's still printed today, still sold under the Morris name, still one of the patterns people reach for when they want a piece of the Arts and Crafts movement. But Morris had been dead for fifteen years when it was drawn. The designer was John Henry Dearle, who arrived at Morris & Co. as a teenager, was trained by Morris himself, and grew into the firm's chief designer.
Dearle was good enough, and faithful enough to what Morris was after, that his work got absorbed into his teacher's name. His patterns sold under Morris's name in his own lifetime — and some still do. Even a major museum still files this one under Morris, a design made years after he died. For a long time that read as Dearle being erased.
It's worth seeing it the other way.
Morris spent his life fighting the Industrial Revolution's idea that an object could come from a machine and no one in particular. He wanted beautiful things made by hand, by people whose names you could know, in a workshop where skill moved from one person to the next. A protégé carrying the work forward so completely you can't find the seam isn't the master being copied. It's the master succeeding. The chain held.
That's the part we think about at Harold & Hazel. Every piece here comes from a maker we can name, in a small American studio, working in a tradition someone taught them. These are giclée-printed on domed brass by David Howell & Company — Leicester, more than a century after Dearle drew it, on a maker's bench in the present.
Wear the story.
Shop the Leicester earrings → https://haroldandhazel.com/products/william-morris-leicester-earrings?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social_organic&utm_campaign=educate&utm_content=william_morris_leicester
