Wallpaper  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Wallpaper is a kind of material used to cover and decorate the interior walls of homes, offices, and other buildings; it is one aspect of interior decoration. It is usually sold in rolls and is put onto a wall using wallpaper paste. Wallpapers can come plain (so that it can be painted), textured (such as Anaglypta), with a regular repeating pattern design, or, much less commonly today, with a single non-repeating large design carried over a set of sheets.

Wallpaper printing techniques include surface printing, gravure printing, silk screen-printing, rotary printing, and digital printing. Wallpaper is made in long rolls which are hung vertically on a wall. Patterned wallpapers are designed so that the pattern "repeats" and pieces cut from the same roll can be hung next to each other so as to continue the pattern without it being easy to see where the join between two pieces occurs. In the case of large complex patterns of images this is normally achieved by starting the second piece halfway into the length of the repeat, so that if the pattern going down the roll repeats after 24 inches the next piece sideways is cut from the roll to begin 12 inches down the pattern from the first. The number of times the pattern repeats horizontally across a roll does not matter for this purpose. A single pattern can be issued in several different colorways.

History

The main historical techniques are: hand-painting, woodblock printing (overall the most common), stencilling, and various types of machine-printing. The first three all date back to before 1700.

Wallpaper, using the printmaking technique of woodcut, gained popularity in Renaissance Europe amongst the emerging gentry. The social elite continued to hang large tapestries on the walls of their homes, as they had in the Middle Ages. These tapestries added color to the room as well as providing an insulating layer between the stone walls and the room, thus retaining heat in the room. However, tapestries were extremely expensive and so only the very rich could afford them. Less well-off members of the elite, unable to buy tapestries due either to prices or wars preventing international trade, turned to wallpaper to brighten up their rooms.

Early wallpaper featured scenes similar to those depicted on tapestries, and large sheets of the paper were sometimes hung loose on the walls, in the style of tapestries, and sometimes pasted as today. Prints were very often pasted to walls, instead of being framed and hung, and the largest sizes of prints, which came in several sheets, were probably mainly intended to be pasted to walls. Some important artists made such pieces - notably Albrecht Dürer, who worked on both large picture prints and also ornament prints - intended for wall-hanging. The largest picture print was The Triumphal Arch commissioned by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and completed in 1515. This measured a colossal 3.57 by 2.95 metres, made up of 192 sheets, and was printed in a first edition of 700 copies, intended to be hung in palaces and, in particular, town halls, after hand-coloring.

Very few samples of the earliest repeating pattern wallpapers survive, but there are a large number of old master prints, often in engraving of repeating or repeatable decorative patterns. These are called ornament prints and were intended as models for wallpaper makers, among other uses.

England and France were leaders in European wallpaper manufacturing. Among the earliest known samples is one found on a wall from England and is printed on the back of a London proclamation of 1509. It became very popular in England following Henry VIII's excommunication from the Catholic Church - English aristocrats had always imported tapestries from Flanders and Arras, but Henry VIII's split with the Catholic Church had resulted in a fall in trade with Europe. Without any tapestry manufacturers in England, English gentry and aristocracy alike turned to wallpaper.

During the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell, the manufacture of wallpaper, seen as a frivolous item by the Puritan government, was halted. Following the Restoration of Charles II, wealthy people across England began demanding wallpaper again - Cromwell's regime had imposed a boring culture on people, and following his death, wealthy people began purchasing comfortable domestic items which had been banned under the Puritan state.

18th century

In 1712, during the reign of Queen Anne, a wallpaper tax was introduced which was not abolished until 1836. By the mid-eighteenth century, Britain was the leading wallpaper manufacturer in Europe, exporting vast quantities to Europe in addition to selling on the middle-class British market. However this trade was seriously disrupted in 1755 by the Seven Years War and later the Napoleonic Wars, and by a heavy level of duty on imports to France.

In 1748 the British Ambassador to Paris decorated his salon with blue flock wallpaper, which then became very fashionable there. In the 1760s the French manufacturer Jean-Baptiste Réveillon hired designers working in silk and tapestry to produce some of the most subtle and luxurious wallpaper ever made. His sky blue wallpaper with fleurs-de-lys was used in 1783 on the first balloons by the Montgolfier brothers. The landscape painter Jean-Baptiste Pillement discovered in 1763 a method to use fast colours.

Hand-blocked wallpapers like these use hand-carved blocks and by the 18th century designs include panoramic views of antique architecture, exotic landscapes and pastoral subjects, as well as repeating patterns of stylized flowers, people and animals.

In 1785 Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf had invented the first machine for printing coloured tints on sheets of wallpaper. In 1799 Louis-Nicolas Robert patented a machine to produce continuous lengths of paper, the forerunner of the Fourdrinier machine. This ability to produce continuous lengths of wallpaper now offered the prospect of novel designs and nice tints being widely displayed in drawing rooms across Europe.Template:R

Wallpaper manufacturers active in England in the 18th c. included John Baptist Jackson. Among the firms established in 18th c. America: J. F. Bumstead & Co. (Boston), William Poyntell (Philadelphia), John Rugar (New York).

High-quality wallpaper made in China became available from the later part of the 17th century; this was entirely handpainted and very expensive. It can still be seen in rooms in palaces and grand houses including Nymphenburg Palace, Łazienki Palace, Chatsworth House, Temple Newsam, Lissan House, and Erddig. It was made up to 1.2 metres wide. English, French and German manufacturers imitated it, usually beginning with a printed outline which was coloured in by hand, a technique sometimes also used in later Chinese papers.

19th century

France and America

Towards the end of the 18th century the fashion for scenic wallpaper revived in both England and France, leading to some enormous panoramas, like the 1804 20 strip wide panorama, Sauvages de la Mer du Pacifique (Savages of the Pacific), designed by the artist Jean-Gabriel Charvet for the French manufacturer Joseph Dufour et Cie showing the Voyages of Captain Cook. This famous so called "papier peint" wallpaper is still in situ in Ham House, Peabody Massachusetts. It was the largest panoramic wallpaper of its time, and marked the burgeoning of a French industry in panoramic wallpapers. Dufour realized almost immediate success from the sale of these papers and enjoyed a lively trade with America. The Neoclassical style currently in favour worked well in houses of the Federal period with Charvet's elegant designs. Like most 18th century wallpapers, the panorama was designed to be hung above a dado.

Beside Joseph Dufour et Cie (1797 - c. 1830) other French manufacturers of panoramic scenic and trompe l'œil wallpapers, Zuber et Cie (1797-present) and Arthur et Robert exported their product across Europe and North America. Zuber et Cie's c. 1834 design Views of North America hangs in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House.

While Joseph Dufour et Cie was shut down in the 1830s, Zuber et Cie still exists and with Cole & Son of England is one the last Western producers of woodblock printed wallpapers. For its production Zuber uses woodblocks out of an archive of more than 100,000 cut in the 19th century which are classified as a "Historical Monument". It offers panoramic sceneries such as "Vue de l'Amérique Nord", "Eldorado Hindoustan" or "Isola Bella" and also wallpapers, friezes and ceilings as well as hand-printed furnishing fabrics.

Among the firms begun in France in the 19th c.: Desfossé & Karth. In the United States: John Bellrose, Blanchard & Curry, Howell Brothers, Longstreth & Sons, Isaac Pugh in Philadelphia; Bigelow, Hayden & Co. in Massachusetts; Christy & Constant, A. Harwood, R. Prince in New York.

England

During the Napoleonic Wars, trade between Europe and Britain evaporated, resulting in the gradual decline of the wallpaper industry in Britain. However, the end of the war saw a massive demand in Europe for British goods which had been inaccessible during the wars, including cheap, colourful wallpaper. The development of steam-powered printing presses in Britain in 1813 allowed manufacturers to mass-produce wallpaper, reducing its price and so making it affordable to working-class people. Wallpaper enjoyed a huge boom in popularity in the nineteenth century, seen as a cheap and very effective way of brightening up cramped and dark rooms in working-class areas. It became almost the norm in most areas of middle-class homes, but remained relatively little used in public buildings and offices, with patterns generally being avoided in such locations. In the latter half of the century Lincrusta and Anaglypta, not strictly wallpapers, became popular competitors, especially below a dado rail. They could be painted and washed, and were a good deal tougher, though also more expensive.

Designers included Owen Jones, William Morris, and Charles Voysey. In particular, many 19th century designs by Morris and Co and other Arts and Crafts designers remain in production.

20th century

By the early twentieth century, wallpaper had established itself as one of the most popular household items across the Western world. Manufacturers in the USA included Sears; designers included Andy Warhol. Wallpaper has gone in and out of fashion since about 1930, but the overall trend has been for wallpaper-type patterned wallcoverings to lose ground to plain painted walls.

See also

• Faux painting
• Mural
• Wall decals
• Wallpaper group