Sunday, December 17, 2017

Architectural Wallpaper Patterns from England

Anonymous English designer
Gothic Architecture
ca. 1820
block-printed wallpaper
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

"Wallpapers illustrating elements of Gothic architecture were popular in the early 19th century.  This one was hung in the Ostrich Hotel at Castle Acre near Swaffham, Norfolk, around 1820.  It  might have been chosen for its relevance to local sights and scenes.  Castle Acre contained a number of ruinous Gothic buildings, notably the Priory church, for which it was well known.  At a time when tourists were often interested in ruins and antiquities, a Gothic wallpaper would have been an apt choice of decoration for a hotel.  In 1841 the architect and designer A.W.N. Pugin wrote dismissively of 'What are commonly termed Gothic pattern papers for hanging on walls, where a wretched caricature of a pointed building is repeated from skirting to cornice, door over pinnacle and pinnacle over door'.  He noted that there was 'a great variety of these miserable patterns', and that the style was 'a great favourite with hotel and tavern keepers'."

– curator's notes from the Victorian & Albert Museum

Anonymous English designer
Imitation Marble Panels
ca. 1830-40
block-printed wallpaper
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous English designer
Imitation Moulded Plaster-work
ca. 1830
block-printed wallpaper
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous English designer
Imitation Tile-work
ca. 1850
block-printed wallpaper
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous English designer
Cornices with Classical Mountings
ca. 1825-50
block-printed wallpaper
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Cowtan & Son
Trompe l'oeil Stonework and Swags
ca. 1840
block-printed wallpaper border
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Arthur Sanderson & Sons
Trompe l'oeil Moulding
ca. 1840-70
block-printed wallpaper border
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Potters of Darwen, Lancashire
Perspective Views of Railway Station
ca. 1853
block-printed wallpaper
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

"In the 1850s wallpapers with pictorial patterns seem to have been very popular and were sold in large quantities.  However, art educators such as Richard Redgrave and Henry Cole considered such papers to be examples of bad design because they gave the illusion of three dimensions on a flat wall surface.  But despite these faults there were some critics, such as a writer in the trade journal The Builder (1851), who believed that pictorial wallpapers were suitable for 'the houses of the humbler classes of society', especially if the subject depicted was educational.  Most papers of this kind have not survived, but it is likely that they were used to decorate social spaces such as railway station waiting rooms, cheap hotels or public bars."

– curator's notes from the Victorian & Albert Museum

Anonymous English designer
Gothic Revival design with Landscape Vignettes
ca. 1840-50
block-printed wallpaper
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York

Anonymous English designer
Views of the International Exhibition of 1862, London 
ca. 1862
block-printed-wallpaper
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Walter Crane for Jeffrey & Co.
Frieze with Caryatids for Alcestis Pattern Wallpaper
1876
block-printed wallpaper
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Walter Crane for Jeffrey & Co.
Frieze with Caryatids for Alcestis Pattern Wallpaper
1876
block-printed wallpaper
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Walter Crane for Jeffrey & Co.
Frieze with Caryatids for Alcestis Pattern Wallpaper
1876
block-printed wallpaper
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Walter Crane for Jeffrey & Co.
Frieze with Caryatids for Alcestis Pattern Wallpaper
1876
block-printed wallpaper
Victoria & Albert Museum, London