WALLPAPERS OF TWO CENTURIES

Evening Star, Issue 23340, 9 August 1939, Page 14

WALLPAPERS OF TWO CENTURIES

OLD PATTERNS TO BE REVIVED The designing of wallpaper, which has been one of the minor arts for several centuries, was admirably illustrated in an exhibition of old French originals and modern reproductions recently held in London. These attractive exhibits came from the celebrated house of Mauny, Pans. They covered a period of two centuries, but more particularly from the time of Louis NV. down to the Second Empire, and some of them are of great historic interest. One fragment, which was found in the room of Robespierre at 398 Faubourg, St. Honore, was printed in flock with a raised pattern to look-like cut velvet or brocade. Hie process employed was to pnnt tUe design in gold size and then blow on to it powdered wool which adhered to the sized portions only.

There was a hand-painted Louis XV. paper that was taken from a .screen. The hand-painting of wallpaper was then much in vogue in France and elsewhere. Old Chinese wallpapers were all hand-painted. The older papers were printed by hand from wood blocks. It was not till about the middle of the nineteenth century that machine printing was used. As they were mainly a substitute for mural Hangings, the designers closely followed the textile patterns, some of the best French examples showing most delicate representations of lace.

One Louis XVI. paper was shown side by side with a hand-embroidered curtain that is said to have come from the boudoir of Mario Antoinette. A specimen of Napoleonic days was of a design known as “ dentelle Josephine.” The earliest known wallpapers date from the sixteenth century, and one is in existence at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Some seventeenth-century fragments were found in a Park Lane house which was being dismantled. They were saved by an expert who snatched them from the hands of a workman while he was carrying them off to be burned as rubbish. Many well-known English decorative artists,” among them William Morris, applied themselves to the designing of wallpapers. Morris, indeed, greatly influenced public taste toward patterns of more mural type. After the war, however, a severer taste in house decoration began to manifest itself, and the demand for fancy wallpapers declined; but, according to the trade, that -phase is*, passing, and a revival of the patterned paper is well on the way.