French Wallpaper Designs of the 1840s

Illustration: French wallpaper design for a drawing room, 1849.

French wallpaper design during the mid nineteenth century, it is fair to say, was not on the scale of that being produced in Britain. However, although the scale of production in Britain was one that was difficult to compete with, this did not necessarily mean that the standard of design was also competitive. Britain could be proud of the fact that its wallpaper retail trade was by no means elitist, and in fact supplied a relatively cheap product to a large proportion of the general public. However, there were particular problems when it came to the standard of pattern work achieved on many examples sold in Britain and this became more acute when compared to those being produced at the same time in France.

The three examples illustrating this article are French derived wallpapers that were imported and then sold across Britain in about 1849. It was a relatively common practice in Britain to sell both home produced and foreign sourced wallpapers. The first two examples were imported by W B Simpson and the third by Jackson & Graham, both companies trading from London.

Illustration: French wallpaper design for a bedroom, 1849.

Most imported wallpapers would have been French. To a certain extent this would have been for the long standing reason that in Britain, France had a long and illustrious reputation for high standards in interior decorative accessories and therefore anything French would have sold well as far as the British retail trade was concerned. However, the reputation was not an idle one as French decorative work was considered to be consistently of a higher standard than the British equivalent. This became more acute when the industrial revolution took over the process of interior accessory production across Britain, where most of the hand produced work disappeared leaving only a very small niche market for those that could afford any form of hand production. Although industrial processes were also widespread in France, detailed hand production still survived as did the French reputation for quality over quantity.

Interestingly, the first two French examples in this article were produced using both machine and hand block printing. All of the first example which was produced ideally for a drawing room, was produced using a cylinder printing process, except for the gilding which was applied by hand block printing. Ironically, the hand-produced gilding actually detracts from the pattern work and seems crudely applied, which is a shame as the pattern itself is very finely tuned and seems almost effortless in its composition.

Illustration: French wallpaper design for a bedroom, 1849.

The second example, produced ideally for a bedroom, had a machine produced background, with a block printed foliage inspired pattern. The industrial process has been limited to a background filler and took no part in the more obvious pattern process. This combination of machine and hand production was a relatively successful process that perhaps should have occurred to British manufacturers as a viable option, particularly when considering the low standards being regularly achieved by British companies using full automation.

In the third example a certain amount of hand block printing was used, though it is unclear if it was entirely hand produced and could well have been a compromise production of both hand and industrial process, as in the first two examples. Whatever the case, it is a fine example of quality production from France, even though the same industrial process as was used extensively in Britain was still part of its manufacture.

This does not necessarily imply that hand production should always be seen as superior to that produced by industry. However, it certainly does imply that the human creative process should be uppermost when considering mass production. When the human element is extracted from the industrial process, leaving little or no room for genuine intuitive flair and creativity, the result is flawed and by its very nature, monotonous. This genuine Achilles heal within the industrial process would ultimately be picked up and intensely highlighted and criticised by the Arts & Crafts movement in particular. Ultimately, it should be remembered that whatever factory or industrial process is used to produce mass manufactured goods, all of those goods will eventually end up in the hands of a human individual. In that respect, understanding the point and usefulness of a product should always have the human element firmly in the centre of its being.

Further reading links:
French Scenic Wallpaper 1795-1865
Wallpaper: The Ultimate Guide
Wallpaper in Decoration
Wallpapers of France, 1800-1850
Off the Wall: Wonderful Wall Coverings of the Twentieth Century
Wallpaper, its history, design and use : with frontispiece in colour and numerous illustrations from
WILLIAM MORRIS WALLPAPERS AND CHINTZES.
Wallpaper in America: From the Seventeenth Century to World War I
Fabrics and Wallpapers for Historic Buildings
French Interiors of the Eighteenth Century
Parisian Interiors
Parisian Interiors: Bold, Elegant, Refined
Victorian Interior Decoration: American Interiors : 1830-1900
Victorian and Edwardian Furniture and Interiors: From the Gothic Revival to Art Nouveau
Hints on Household Taste: The Classic Handbook of Victorian Interior Decoration
Principles of Victorian Decorative Design

Wallpaper Design by Emanuel Josef Margold

Illustration: Emanuel Josef Margold. Wallpaper design, c1910.

Wallpaper design work is often looked down upon as one of the lesser decorative skills. William Morris was particularly sneering and saw no real creative value or point to wallpaper pattern work. However, that did not stop him from producing prodigious rolls of the stuff throughout most of his career and to a certain extent, it could be said to have kept Morris & Co afloat through the most difficult economic times of the company.

Wallpaper design work is often indicative of a specific design style and can be easily identified and associated, often more so than textiles, with a particular decorative era. Sometimes wallpaper pattern work could even be slightly ahead of the more generalised decorative periods, and examples of wallpaper work can be seen that pre-empted a number of the major interior styles and movements, particularly in the twentieth century. However, even when considering nineteenth and indeed eighteenth century wallpaper work, styles and pattern work were often relatively immediate and topical. Whether this had more to do with the immediacy of the medium, compared to other areas of interiors such as textiles and furniture, or whether it had more to do with the large number of companies involved in the business of wallpaper making and the extreme competition that that engendered, is to be debated.

Wallpaper decoration and the professional designers that fed the industry, usually on a freelance commission basis, were wide-ranging and covered a host of skills from illustration to architecture. Many had little or no experience in the basics of wallpaper design, which is a technical as well as creative occupation. That a large proportion of designers, both commissioned and employed by wallpaper companies were primarily textile designers, suggests a similarity in both design fields. This would help to explain why textiles and wallpaper design are often so closely linked as disciplines when discussing the history of interiors.

The Austrian architect and designer Emanuel Josef Margold produced the two wallpaper designs that illustrate this article at the turn of the first decade of the twentieth century, in about 1910. Margold was known to have produced a range of work during the early twentieth century that included printed and woven textiles, embroidery, and wallpaper design. He was a member of the Wiener Werkstatte where he was for a while Josef Hoffmann's assistant. This relationship often gives the impression that Margold's work was derived from that of Hoffmann, and while there is a certain similarity, it only really corresponds when seen in the larger light of Austrian and German Jugendstil decoration. It has to be remembered that while Margold was indeed a member of the Wiener Werkstatte, he was also a one time resident at the Darmstadt Artists' colony, and also a member of both the German and Austrian Werkbund. This perhaps gives Margold a much larger and more comprehensive appreciation of the decorative arts in Central Europe before the First World War, and also that of his place within it, than perhaps the generalised moniker of being an assistant to Josef Hoffmann.

Illustration: Emanuel Josef Margold. Wallpaper design, c1910.

As to the two examples of his decorative wallpaper work, both appear bold, strikingly confident and graphically motivated. Neither show any of the complexity and involved style that was popular in both France and Britain. To be fair there was an element of pairing down and simplifying of wallpaper design even in France and Britain, although both came to this result from different directions, which was often the result of revivals and historical precedents. However, neither country was involved in modern ideals on anywhere near the scale produced in Central Europe. The movement in Germany and Austria was very much a matter of looking for new concepts and ideas and using many of the new skills being rapidly developed in both architecture and illustration.

This initial discovery and exploration was to become an unstoppable movement that would take decoration and pattern into a whole new area of exploration during the 1920s and 1930s. Inevitably due to the start already made by Margold and others like him throughout Germany and Austria in the first decade of the twentieth century, the notion of true modernism and the exploration and development of that decorative ideal went much further and faster than that of France with its conservatively and elitist led Art Deco formula. 

That decoration and pattern itself was to suffer the shock of being removed or at least disassociated from architecture, and to an extent interiors by the Modernist movement, has led to a seemingly permanent disruption of the central role decoration played for centuries in the cultural life of Europe. That Modernism generally saw the decorative arts as an irrelevance, is still very much with us today and can clearly be seen when considering the very subservient role that the decorative arts play in the world of contemporary architecture.

This was clearly not in the minds of those who designed wallpaper pattern work in 1910. However, the direction of increased simplicity on all fronts of the decorative arts during this period, does beg the question as to the reasoning behind the simplifying and de-cluttering of interiors. It seems as if there was perhaps more significance to the downsizing and eventual downgrading of decoration and pattern than being merely that of the removal of the more ornate excesses of late Victorian decoration and the increasingly scientific approach to health and interiors. Not a conspiracy as such, but perhaps a generalised shift in emphasis and ideal.

Further reading links:
Wallpaper: A History of Style and Trends
Pattern Design: Period Design Source Book
Wallpaper, its history, design and use,
Twentieth-Century Pattern Design
German Modernism: Music and the Arts (California Studies in 20th-Century Music)
Exotic Spaces in German Modernism (Oxford Modern Languages & Literature Monographs)
The Total Work of Art in European Modernism (Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought)
Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism (Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity)
German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890-1924
German Encounters with Modernism, 1840-1945
The Divided Heritage: Themes and Problems in German Modernism
Wiener Werkstatte: 1903-1932 (Special Edition)
Wiener Werkstatte: Design in Vienna 1903-1932
Textiles of the Wiener Werkstatte: 1910-1932
Viennese Design and the Wiener Werkstatte
Wiener Werkstatte: Avantgarde, Art Deco, Industrial Design (German Edition)
Wonderful Wiener Werkstatte

Imitation Moulding Wallpapers of the 1840s

Illustration: Turner & Sons. Imitation moulding wallpaper design, 1849.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw a rise in the popularity of imitation wallpapers. These were wallpaper designs that were created specifically to portray the illusion that they were either types of materials or a form of decoration, which they clearly were not. Therefore, many of these wallpapers created an effect of a pretence to marble and other stonework, as well as a number of expensive imported woods. Our modern day equivalent would probably be laminate flooring, which gives the impression from a distance of solid wood floors, but clearly on closer inspection is just a photograph of a wood effect pasted onto pressed wood dust.

As to the nineteenth century decorative effects themselves, moulding styles usually based on a classical theme, were particularly fashionable. It seems unlikely that these imitation moulding wallpapers would have actually fooled anyone into believing that they were originals, but perhaps that was never their real intention. It seems likely that they were intended to give an ambience, rather than to be dishonest. In the hands of professional decorators these imitation wallpaper themes could prove very effective. However, some customers when deciding to take on their own decorative schemes, either through lack of funds or a misguided appreciation of their own decorative skills, did use them sometimes in staggering degrees of excess. They could be found in some homes framing the frames of paintings and the individual panels of doors. They were also used to border every conceivable wall and ceiling surface, even producing geometric patterns on ceilings, which gave the altogether disconcerting effect of outlining everything with a bold pen or brush.

The two pieces illustrating this article were produced by the English company Turner & Sons in 1849. They are representations of standard Greek style stucco moulding that could have been found in any Georgian or early Victorian interior and are therefore part of the general Georgian theme rather than that of the later Victorian. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, many of these imitation wallpapers were frowned on as being deliberately illusional or at least misrepresentations of reality. However, this did not stop the concept of imitation decoration as the large and complex trade in paint effects became extremely fashionable. The effects of both stone and wood were endlessly copied in different types of paint effect, on walls, ceilings, doors, windows and furniture. That one of the most popular paint effect techniques was the illusional representation of marble, perhaps says much about the later Victorian era.

Illustration: Turner & Sons. Imitation moulding wallpaper design, 1849.

Styles were often different within wallpapers themselves, with paper designs that was to be seen at a closer level were usually much more complex than those that were to be seen from a greater distance such as ceiling or near ceiling height. These imitation wallpapers sometimes gave the design reform movement great difficulty as many were against any form of obvious dishonesty or illusional form. That these decorative designs did both left some critics in no doubt as to their dubious intentions and purpose. However, other critics saw these decorative wallpaper effects as merely giving an ambience without the intention of deceit, and were therefore perfectly acceptable for interior use. To go back to our own contemporary analogy of laminate flooring, does the laminate try to portray itself as a solid wood floor, or does it instead give an overall ambience that would be appreciative of a room with a solid wood floor, while still being obvious to everyone that it was a laminate.

One thing that is sure is the fact that imitation wallpaper and paint effects were around for a long time before the mid nineteenth century and are still very much with us in the twenty first.

Further reading links:
Fabrics and Wallpapers: Twentieth-Century Design
Wall Papers for Historic Buildings: A Guide to Selecting Reproduction Wallpapers
Wallpaper: A History of Style and Trends
Wallpaper, its history, design and use,
Fabrics and Wallpapers: Design Source Book
Wallpaper (Historic Houses Trust Collection)
Wallpaper and the Artist: From Durer to Warhol
French Scenic Wallpaper 1795-1865
Landscape Wallcoverings (Cooper Hewitt National Design)
Fabrics and Wallpapers for Historic Buildings
Pattern Design: Period Design Source Book
The Papered Wall: The History, Patterns and Techniques of Wallpaper, Second Edition
Wallpaper in Interior Decoration
Wallpaper: The Ultimate Guide
London Wallpapers: Their Manufacture and Use 1690-1840 (Revised Edition)
Victorian Wallpaper Designs (Internatinal Design Library)
Twentieth-Century Pattern Design
Wallpaper in America: From the Seventeenth Century to World War I
Wallpaper, Its History, Design and Use; With Frontispiece in Colour and Numerous Illustrations From Photographs