Pat Albeck, who has died aged 87, was a prolific, gifted designer of printed textiles whose genius for flat pattern also took her into design for ceramics, wallpapers and a whole range of merchandise for the National Trust.
Her work looked effortless but this was deceptive. Informed by a prolonged art education, she had an unstoppable appetite for work and a remarkable graphic sensibility. From her bold Apples and Pears fabric pattern, made in 1952 while still a student at the Royal College of Art (RCA), to her 1960s Daisychain design for John Lewis, a bestseller for 15 years and reissued in 2014 for the store’s 150th anniversary, Albeck’s work had enormous popular appeal, much of it entering our homes anonymously, as dress or furnishing fabric or as flat pattern adorning every kind of object.
She was an inspiring mentor to younger designers who served informal apprenticeships – including Susan Collier of Collier Campbell and Clare Johnston, until recently professor of textiles at the RCA. In later years her work gained new audiences through commissions from the ceramics manufacturer Emma Bridgewater, her daughter-in-law.
Born in Hull, Pat was the youngest of four daughters of Max and Sarah Albeck, both from Zarembi, a small village near Warsaw where Max’s father had been a rabbi. The couple left Poland for London and by 1919 had moved to Hull, where Max set up business as a manufacturing furrier, privately espousing the anarchist cause, a regular subscriber to the journal Freedom.
When Pat was three the family moved to a new house in the nearby village of Anlaby, commissioned by her father. Albeck recalled the exterior as “stockbroker Tudor”, but the art deco interior (created by a local stage designer) included abstract murals and rugs, stained glass designed by art students, including a scene of Little Red Riding Hood in Pat’s bedroom, and a garden with crescent moon flowerbeds and early lilac in the greenhouse.
At Beverley high school for girls Pat had an excellent art teacher who focused on pattern-making and calligraphy. She spent four years at Hull College of Arts and Crafts at a time when ex-servicemen were flooding art schools, inspiring in their seriousness and determination and in 1950 won a scholarship to the RCA in London, to study printed textile design. From the start she found art materials inspiring, using all types of paper, often for cut-outs and collage, paints, fine inks applied by brush, and pens – including, by the 60s, felt-tips.
Albeck soon emerged as one of the elite fledgling consultant designers produced by the RCA. In 1952 she was included in the show Art for the Factory at the Imperial Institute, the first show put on by the college entirely devoted to industrial design, alongside silversmiths such as David Mellor and Robert Welch, and the furniture designers Ronald Carter and Robert Heritage.
While she was still a student, her Apples and Pears print was bought as a dress length by Elsbeth Juda, photographer and co-founder of the influential textile and fashion magazine The Ambassador, and Albeck sold a black stripe with a red rose design to Horrockses Fashion (a subsidiary of the textile firm Horrockses, Crewdson & Co).
She proved a brilliant designer for Horrockses. The firm’s charming full-skirted dresses, many using Albeck’s textiles, are now collectors’ items. Albeck worked for the company continuously after leaving college, producing a stream of knowing and sharply drawn variations of stripes and flora, with diversions into architecture, including her playful Venice Fish Market, inspired by a 1953 RCA travel scholarship, and her Fruit and Stripe design chosen by Sir Hugh Casson, then head of interior design at the RCA, for his office curtains. In 1954 she married her fellow student Peter Rice, the stage designer, borrowing the weaver Margaret Leischner’s Morris Minor for a brief honeymoon.
In 1958 Albeck left Horrockses, embarking on a highly successful freelance career that included Plum, a wallpaper for Sanderson’s centenary in 1960, and exquisite patterns for tableware, which took her to Stoke-on-Trent and won her a Council of Industrial Design (now Design Council) award in 1958. The 1960s saw inspirational visits to New York and to Australia, the latter on a Cotton Board scholarship, and the birth of her son, Matthew, in 1962. He was to inspire nursery textiles and wallpapers, and several children’s books.
Cavendish Textiles, the production company for John Lewis, became an important client. The popular Daisychain, a response to John Lewis’s request for a William Morris-inspired print, was produced in different colourways each year. She designed dress fabrics for Samuel Sherman’s Dollyrockers range – on his advice she studied the film Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964) for its remarkable colour values – and worked for Osman Textiles and Palladio Wallpaper. She also wrote the textbook Printed Textiles, for Oxford University Press (1969).
In the 1970s she began her longstanding association with the National Trust, introduced by her Hammersmith neighbour the artist Mary Fedden, whose cousin Robin Fedden was then the trust’s director. Her work for the organisation included her famous tea towels, whose intricate narrative charm often led them to be framed by purchasers. By the 1980s she was creating whole ranges of co-ordinated products – from table mats to desk accessories – usually inspired by a detail in a specific trust property.
Albeck took commissions from her son Matthew Rice’s paper company, and on his marriage to Emma Bridgewater in 1987 continued to design for them both. She began a series of flower paintings in the 80s and 90s, moving on to remarkable cut paper pictures, a selection of which were exhibited at Colefax and Fowler in Pimlico, London, in May this year, to coincide with the Chelsea Flower Show. Watching her wield her scissors freehand, fluently cutting out flowers, leaves and fruit, was a remarkable experience. Her love of flowers was further celebrated in her illustrations for Anthony Footit’s Gospel of Wild Flowers (2006). She was busy at her desk until a few days before she died.
Albeck and her husband had separate studios at home, first in Hammersmith, after 2000 in Norfolk, and finally in Oxfordshire. After dinner the couple would invariably return to work, obeying the shared mantra “back to the drawing board”, the title of a film and an exhibition celebrating their joint careers held at Keele University last year.
Diminutive, sporting striking spectacles, bright-eyed and beautifully and colourfully dressed, Albeck always gave generously – serving on numerous design committees and as external examiner to many schools of art. Her archives are in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s archive of art and design.
Peter died in 2015. Albeck is survived by Matthew and by her grandchildren, Lil, Kitty, Margaret and Michael
• Judith Patricia Albeck, designer, born 17 March 1930; died 2 September 2017
