Old Time Wall Papers Part 2

II

PROGRESS AND IMPROVEMENT IN THE ART

[Ill.u.s.tration]

II

PROGRESS AND IMPROVEMENT IN THE ART

If we go far enough back in trying to decide the origin of almost any important discovery, we are sure to find many claimants for the honor.

It is said, on good authority, that "paper-hangings for the walls of rooms were originally introduced in China." This may safely be accepted as correct. The Chinese certainly discovered how to make paper, then a better sort for wall hangings, and by Chinese prisoners it was carried to Arabia. Travellers taking the news of the art to their homes in various countries, it soon became a subject of general interest, and variations and inventions in paper manufacture were numerous.

We are apt to forget how much we owe to the Chinese nation--the mariners' compa.s.s, gun-powder, paper, printing by moveable types (a daily paper has been published in Pekin for twelve hundred years, printed, too, on silk). They had what we call The Golden Rule five hundred years before Christ was born. With six times the population of the United States, they are the only people in the world who have maintained a government for three thousand years.

The earliest papers we hear of anywhere were imported from China, and had Chinese or Indian patterns; coming first in small sheets, then in rolls. Some of the more elaborate kinds were printed by hand; others were printed from blocks. These papers, used for walls, for hangings, and for screens, were called "paG.o.da papers," and were decorated with flowers, symbolic animals and human figures.

The Dutch were among the most enterprising, importing painted hangings from China and the East about the middle of the sixteenth century.

Perhaps these originated in Persia; the word "chintz" is of Persian origin, and the French name for its imitations was "perses."

From the Dutch, these imported hangings were soon carried to England, France, Germany and other Continental nations. Each nation was deadly jealous in regard to paper-making, even resorting, in Germany in 1390, to solemn vows of secrecy from the workman and threats of imprisonment for betrayal of methods. Two or three centuries later, the Dutch prohibited the exportation of moulds under no less a penalty than death.

The oldest allusion to printed wall-papers that I have found is in an account of the trial, in 1568, of a Dutch printer, Herman Sc.h.i.n.kel of Delft, on the charge of printing books inimical to the Catholic faith.

The examination showed that Sc.h.i.n.kel took ballad paper and printed roses and stripes on the back of it, to be used as a covering for attic walls.

In the Library of the British Museum may be seen a book, printed in Low Dutch, made of sixty specimens of paper, each of a different material.

The animal and vegetable products of which the workmen of various countries tried to manufacture paper would make a surprising list. In England, a paper-mill was set up probably a century before Shakespeare's time. In the second part of _Henry the Sixth_ is a reference to a paper-mill.

About 1745, the Campagnie des Indes began to import these papers directly. They were then also called "Indian" papers. August 21, 1784, we find an advertis.e.m.e.nt: "For sale--20 sheets of India paper, representing the cultivation of tea."

Such a paper, with this same theme, was brought to America one hundred and fifty years ago--a hand-painted Chinese wall-paper, which has been on a house in Dedham ever since, and is to-day in a very good state of preservation. Of this paper I give three reproductions from different walls of the room.

In _Le Mercure_, June, 1753, M. Prudomme advertised an a.s.sortment of China paper of different sizes; and again, in May, 1758, that he had received many very beautiful India papers, painted, in various sizes and grounds, suitable for many uses, and including every kind that could be desired. This was the same thing that was called "China" paper five years before.

The great development of the home manufacture of wall-papers, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, put an end to the importation from China. The English were probably the first importers of these highly decorative Chinese papers, and quickly imitated them by printing the papers. These "_papiers Anglais_" soon became known on the Continent, and the French were also at work as rivals in their manufacture and use.

Of a book published in 1847, called _The Laws of Harmonious Colouring_, the author, one David R. Hay, was house painter and decorator to the Queen. I find that he was employed as a decorator and paper-hanger by Sir Walter Scott, and he says that Sir Walter directed everything personally. Mr. Hay speaks of a certain Indian paper, of crimson color, with a small gilded pattern upon it. "This paper Sir Walter did not quite approve of for a dining-room, but as he got it as a present, expressly for that purpose, and as he believed it to be rare, he would have it put up in that room rather than hurt the feelings of the donor.

I observed to Sir Walter that there would be scarcely enough to cover the wall; he replied in that case I might paint the recess for the side-board in imitation of oak." Mr. Hay found afterwards that there was quite enough paper, but Sir Walter, when he saw the paper on the recess, heartily wished that the paper had fallen short, as he liked the recess much better unpapered. So in the night Mr. Hay took off the paper and painted the recess to look like paneled oak. This was in 1822.

Sir Walter, in a letter to a friend, speaks of "the most splendid Chinese paper, twelve feet high by four wide; enough to finish the drawing-room and two bed-rooms, the color being green, with rich Chinese figures." Scott's own poem, _The Lady of the Lake_, has been a favorite theme for wall-paper.

Professor W. E. D. Scott, the Curator of Ornithology at Princeton College, in his recent book, _The Story of a Bird Lover_, alludes, in a chapter about his childhood, to the papers on the walls of his grandfather's home: "As a boy, the halls interested me enormously; they have been papered with such wall-paper as I have never seen elsewhere.

The entrance hall portrayed a vista of Paris, apparently arranged along the Seine, with ladies and gentlemen promenading the banks, and all the notable buildings, the Pantheon, Notre Dame, and many more distributed in the scene, the river running in front.

"But it was when I reached the second story that my childish imagination was exercised. Here the panorama was of a different kind; it represented scenes in India--the pursuit of deer and various kinds of smaller game, the hunting of the lion and the tiger by the the natives, perched on great elephants with magnificent trappings. These views are not duplicated in the wall-paper; the scene is continuous, pa.s.sing from one end of the hall to the other, a panorama rich in color and incident. I had thus in my mind a picture of India, I knew what kind of trees grew there, I knew the clothes people wore and the arms they used while hunting. To-day the same paper hangs in the halls of the old house."

There are several papers of this sort, distinctly Chinese, still on walls in this country. A house near Portsmouth, which once belonged to Governor Wentworth, has one room of such paper, put on about 1750. In Boston, in a Beacon Street house, there is a room adorned with a paper made to order in China, with a pattern of birds and flowers, in which there is no repet.i.tion; and this is not an uncommon find. A brilliant example of this style may be seen in Salem, Ma.s.s.

Chinese papers, which were made for lining screens and covering boxes, were used in England and this country for wall-papers, and imitated both there and here. One expert tells me that the early English papers were often designed after India cottons, in large bold patterns.

The first use in France of wall-papers of French manufacture was in the sixth century. Vachon tells about Jehan Boudichon and his fifty rolls of paper for the King's bed-chamber in 1481, lettered and painted blue; but it is evident from the context that they were not fastened on the walls, but held as scrolls by figures of angels.

Colored papers were used for temporary decorations at this time, as at the entrance of Louis XIII. into Lyons, on July 17, 1507. There is nothing to show that the "_deux grans pans de papier paincts_,"

containing the history of the Pa.s.sion, and of the destruction of Jerusalem from the effects of the cannon of St. Peter, were permanently applied to a wall. So with another painted paper, containing the genealogy of the Kings of France, among the effects of Jean Nagerel, archdeacon at Rouen in 1750. These pictured papers, hung up on the walls as a movable decoration, form one step in the development of applied wall-papers.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the commonest patterns for unpictorial wall decoration were taken from the damasks and cut-velvets of Sicily, Florence, Genoa, and other places in Italy. Some form of the pine-apple or artichoke pattern was the favorite, a design developed partly from Oriental sources and coming to perfection at the end of the fifteenth century, copied and reproduced in textiles, printed stuffs, and wall-papers, with but little change, down to the nineteenth century.

From the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. XVII, I quote again: "Wall-papers did not come into common use in Europe until the eighteenth century, though they appear to have been used much earlier by the Chinese. A few rare examples exist in England, which may be as early as the eighteenth century; these are imitations, generally in flock, of the fine old Florentine and Genoese cut-velvets, and hence the style of the design in no way shows the date of the paper, the same traditional patterns being reproduced for many years, with little or no change.

Machinery enabling paper to be made in long strips was not invented till the end of the eighteenth century, and up to that time wall-paper was painted on small squares of hand-made paper, difficult to hang, disfigured by joints, and consequently costly; on this account wall-papers were slow in superseding the older modes of mural decoration, such as wood panelling, painting, tapestry, stamped leather, and printed cloth. A little work by Jackson, of Battersea, printed in London in 1744, gives some light on papers used at that time. He gives reduced copies of his designs, mostly taken from Italian pictures or antique sculpture during his residence in Venice. Instead of flowering patterns covering the walls, his designs are all pictures--landscapes, architectural scenes, or statues--treated as panels, with plain paper or painting between. They are all printed in oil, with wooden blocks worked with a rolling press, apparently an invention of his own. They are all in the worst possible taste, and yet are offered as an improvement on the Chinese papers then in vogue."

In 1586 there was in Paris a corporation called _dominotiers_, domino makers, which had the exclusive right to manufacture colored papers; and they were evidently not a new body. "Domino" was an Italian word, used in Italy as early as the fifteenth century for marbled paper. French gentlemen, returning from Milan and Naples, brought back boxes or caskets lined with these papers, which were imitated in France and soon became an important article of trade. The foreign name was kept because of the prejudice in favor of foreign articles. But French taste introduced a change in the character of the ornament, preferring symmetrical designs to the hap-hazard effect of the marbling. They began then to print with blocks various arabesques, and to fill in the outlines with the brush.

In Furetiere's Dictionary, of the last quarter of the seventeenth century, _dominotier_ is defined, "workman who makes marbled paper and other papers of all colors and printed with various figures, which the people used to call 'dominos'."

On March 15, 1787, a decree of the French King's Council of State declared that the art of painting and printing paper to be used in furnishings was a dependence of the governing board of the "_Marchands-Papetiers-Dominotiere-Feuilletinere_."

This domino-work was for a long time princ.i.p.ally used by country folk and the humbler citizens of Paris to cover parts of their rooms and shops; but near the end of the seventeenth century there was hardly a house in Paris, however magnificent, that did not have some place adorned with some of this domino-work, with flowers, fruits, animals and small human figures. These pictures were often arranged in compartments.

The dominotiers made paper tapestries also, and had the right to represent portraits, mythological scenes and Old and New Testament stories. At first they introduced written explanations, but the letter printers thought this an infringement of their rights; therefore it was omitted.

We are told by Aumonier that little precise information is to be found concerning the domino papers. "Some were made from blocks of pear-tree wood, with the parts to be printed left in relief, like type. The designs were small pictures and in separate sheets, each subject complete to itself. They were executed in printing-ink by means of the ordinary printing-press. Some were afterwards finished by hand in distemper colors; others were printed in oil, gold-sized and dusted over with powdered colors, which gave them some resemblance to flock papers."

Much is said about flock paper, and many were the methods of preparing it. Here is one: "Flock paper, commonly called cloth paper, is made by printing the figures with an adhesive liquid, commonly linseed oil, boiled, or litharge. The surface is then covered with the flock, or woolen dust, which is produced in manufactories by the shearing of woolen cloths, and which is dyed of the requisite colors. After being agitated in contact with the paper, the flocks are shaken off, leaving a coating resembling cloth upon the adhesive surface of the figures." The manufacture of this paper was practised, both in England and France, early in the seventeenth century. I find in the Oxford Dictionary the following examples of the early mention of flock cloth, which was the thing that suggested to Le Francois his invention of flock paper:

Act I of Richard III., C. 8, preamble: "The Sellers of such course Clothes, being bare of Threde, usen for to powder the cast Flokkys of fynner Cloth upon the same." Again in 1541, Act of Henry VIII., C. 18: "Thei--shall (not) make or stoppe any maner Kerseies with flocks."

"Flock, which is one of the most valuable materials used in paper staining, not only from its cost, but from its great usefulness in producing rich and velvety effects, is wool cut to a fine powder. The wool can be used in natural color or dyed to any tint. The waste from cloth manufactures furnished the chief supply, the white uniforms of the Austrian soldiery supplying a considerable portion."

Other substances have been tried, as ground cork, flock made from kids'

and goats' hair, the cuttings of furs and feathers, wood, sawdust, and, lately, a very beautiful flock made of silk, which gives a magnificent effect, but is so expensive that it can only be used for "_Tentures de luxe_."

Mr. Aumonier says: "Until quite recently there were on the walls of some of the public rooms in Hampton Court Palace several old flock papers, which had been hung so long ago that there is now no official record of when they were supplied. They were of fine, bold design, giving dignity to the apartments, and it is greatly to be regretted that some of them have been lately replaced by a comparatively insignificant design in bronze, which already shows signs of tarnishing, and which will eventually become of an unsightly, dirty black. All decorators who love their art will regret the loss of these fine old papers, and will join with the writer in the hope that the responsible authorities will not disturb those that still remain, so long as they can be kept on the walls; and when that is no longer possible, that they will have the designs reproduced in fac-simile, which could be done at a comparatively small cost.

"Mr. Crace, in his _History of Paperhangings_, says that by the combination of flock and metal, 'very splendid hangings' are produced; an opinion to which he gave practical expression some years afterwards when he was engaged in decorating the new House of Parliament, using for many of the rooms rich and sumptuous hangings of this character, especially designed by the elder Pugin, and manufactured for Mr. Crace from his own blocks."

In England, in the time of Queen Anne, paper staining had become an industry of some importance, since it was taxed with others for raising supplies "to carry on the present war"--Marlborough's campaign in the low countries against France. Clarence Cook, whom I am so frequently quoting because he wrote so much worth quoting, says:

"One of the pleasant features of the Queen Anne style is its freedom from pedantry, its willingness to admit into its scheme of ornamentation almost anything that is intrinsically pretty or graceful. We can, if we choose, paint the papers and stuffs with which we cover our walls with wreaths of flowers and festoons of fruits; with groups of figures from poetry or history; with grotesques and arabesques, from Rome and Pompeii, pa.s.sed through the brains of Louis XIV's Frenchmen or of Anne's Englishmen; with landscapes, even, pretty pastorals set in framework of wreaths or ribbon, or more simply arranged like regular spots in rows of alternate subjects."

It may be interesting to remember that the pretty wall-papers of the days of Queen Anne and early Georges were designed by n.o.body in particular, at a time when there were no art schools anywhere; and one can easily see that the wall-papers, the stuff-patterns and the furniture of that time are in harmony, showing that they came out of the same creative mould, and were the product of a sort of spirit-of-the-age.

Mica, powdered gla.s.s, glittering metallic dust or sand, silver dross, and even gold foil, were later used, and a silver-colored glimmer called cat-silver, all to produce a brilliant effect. This art was known long ago in China, and I am told of a Chinese paper, seen in St. Petersburg, which had all over it a silver-colored l.u.s.tre.

Block printing and stencilling naturally belong to this subject, but, as my theme is "Old Time Wall Papers," and my book is not intended to be technical, or a book of reference as regards their manufacture, I shall not dwell on them.

Nor would it be wise to detail all the rival claimants for the honor of inventing a way of making wall-paper in rolls instead of small sheets; nor to give the names even of all the famous paper-makers. One, immortalized by Carlyle in his _French Revolution_, must be mentioned--Revillon, whose papers in water colors and in flock were so perfect and so extremely beautiful that Madame de Genlis said they cost as much as fine Gobelin tapestry. Revillon had a large factory in the Rue du Faubourg St. Antoine, Paris, and in 1788 was employing three hundred hands. He was urged to incite his workmen to head the Faubourg in open rebellion, but refused to listen; and angry at his inability to coerce this honorable man the envoy caused a false report to be spread about, that he intended to cut his wages one-half.