Nonetheless, I hope here to give a potted history of this sticky substance. Most historians agree that wallpaper paste was invented in by a Dutchman named Heidrich Von Pasten III, although there are several other claims to the title.
Common wisdom has it that one day he was fed up of using inferior wall adhesives whilst decorating his library and decided to solve the problem once and for all. He hired several Glue Masters from the Dutch Guild of Adhesion and demanded that they find him a solution to resolve the non-sticky situation. After six months, none of the Glue Masters had managed to come up with a workable solution and so Von Pasten III is said to have shot them all.
Von Pasten III was so pleased with his invention he took it to the Dutch courts to apply for a patent. Jean Bourdichon painted 50 rolls of paper with angels on a blue background for Louis XI of France in King Louis ordered the portable wallpaper because he found it necessary to move frequently from castle to castle. Other well-heeled Europeans commissioned artists to paint paper for their walls, but real wallpaper can hardly be said to have existed till the advent of the printing press.
The earliest know fragment of European wallpaper that still exists today was found on the beams of the Lodge of Christ's College in Cambridge, England and dates from The paper is attributed to Hugo Goes, a printer in York.
A guild of paperhangers was first established in France in Jean-Michel Papillon, a French engraver and considered the inventor of wallpaper, started making block designs in matching, continuous patterns in , and wallpaper as we know it today was on its way.
The oldest existing example of flocked wallpaper comes from Worcester and was created in approximately The manufacturing methods developed by the English are significant, and the products from 18th century London workshops became all the rage. At first, fashion conscious Londoners ordered expensive hand painted papers that imitated architectural details or materials like marble and stucco, but eventually wallpapers won favor on their own merits.
Borders resembling a tasseled braid or a swag of fabric were often added, and flocked papers that looked like cut velvet were immensely popular. Wallpaper came to America in , when Plunket Fleeson began printing wallpaper in Philadelphia. In early America, colonials copied European fashions. After the Revolutionary War, Americans set up workshops of their own. Paper was all the fashion, from neoclassical looks to rambling roses. American firms made their share of patriotic "commemorative" papers, which we have come to know from trunk linings and bandboxes.
In , Louis XVI issued a decree that required the length of a wallpaper roll be about 34 feet. Frenchmen, Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf invented the first machine for printing wallpaper in Yet, it was this very popularity that led to wallpaper being regarded as the poor relation of the decorative arts.
Many early wallpapers featured stylised floral motifs and simple pictorial scenes copied from contemporary embroideries and other textiles. They were printed in monochrome, in black ink on small sheets of paper that measured approximately 40 cm high by 50 cm wide. It was not until the midth century that the single sheets were joined together to form long rolls, a development that also encouraged the production of larger repeats and the introduction of block-printing, which continued to be used in the manufacture of more expensive wallpapers until the midth century.
In this process, the design was engraved onto the surface of a rectangular wooden block. Then the block was inked with paint and placed face down on the paper for printing. Polychrome patterns required the use of several blocks — one for every colour. Each colour was printed separately along the length of the roll, which was then hung up to dry before the next colour could be applied.
The process was laborious and required considerable skill. In a process that can take up to 4 weeks, using 30 different blocks and 15 separate colours, this video recreates the painstaking process in block-printing a William Morris wallpaper design from Technical improvements in the block-printing process meant that by the middle of the 18th century patterns could be printed in many colours and styles and the wallpaper industry in Britain flourished.
As a result, it attracted the attention of the Excise Office who saw in wallpaper a potentially rich new source of revenue. These taxes inevitably led to increased prices and encouraged manufacturers to focus on more expensive wallpapers. Despite this, demand remained high and elegantly coloured patterns were sold by fashionable upholsterers like Thomas Chippendale. The period was also particularly rich and inventive in terms of design.
Floral patterns containing finely-coloured roses and carnations were most popular but architectural and landscape scenes were also admired. A paper from Doddington Hall contains framed figures and landscapes interspersed with flowers and insects, and the bright blues and pinks remind us that 18th-century interiors were often decorated in vivid colours.
The idea of a wallpaper incorporating pictures within frames was inspired by the fashion for rooms decorated with prints cut out and pasted directly on to the wall, known as Print Rooms, that were pioneered by collectors such as Horace Walpole. Most flock patterns were copied from textiles and imitated the appearance of cut velvets and silk damasks.
Flock wallpapers were made with powdered wool, a waste product of the woollen industry, which was shaken over a fabric prepared with a design printed in varnish or size a substance similar to glue.
The powdered wool formed a rich pile that stuck to those areas covered by the design. At first, flock was applied to canvas or linen, but in Jerome Lanier, a Huguenot refugee working in London, patented a method by which the coloured wools could be applied to painted paper, and by the end of the 17th century flock wallpapers, as we know them, had appeared. They quickly became extremely fashionable. Their ability to accurately imitate textiles, at a time when it was customary to cover walls with fabric, was greatly admired, as was their cheaper price.
Flock papers also had the added advantage of repelling moths due to turpentine used in the adhesive. A particularly magnificent example, featuring a large damask design of crimson flock on a deep pink background, was hung in the Privy Council offices, Whitehall, around , and in the Queen's Drawing Room in Hampton Court Palace.
By the third quarter of the 18th century there was hardly a country house in England that did not have at least one room decorated in a similar fashion.
An even more expensive decoration were the wallpapers made in China that first appeared in London in the late 17th century as part of a larger trade in Chinese lacquer, porcelain and silks. They rapidly came to dominate the market for luxury wall coverings for the next hundred years. Unlike European wallpapers, Chinese papers were painted, not printed, and featured large-scale, non-repeating pictorial scenes. Every set of papers was individually composed but the designs tended to fall into two groups.
The first depicted the occupations and activities of Chinese life, while the second represented an assortment of exotic plants and birds, elegantly balanced in a landscape of shrubs and trees, that covered the walls of an entire room. Ironically, the Chinese did not use wallpapers themselves and their products were made exclusively for export. The accuracy and sophistication of their colours, and the naturalism and detail of their designs set new standards of excellence in wallpaper manufacture and established it as a luxury decoration much sought after.
However, such was their reputation that before long European manufacturers were producing printed and hand-coloured imitations. Read more about Chinese wallpapers and the chinoiserie style. Up until all wallpapers were produced by hand using the block-printing process that, as we have seen, was labour-intensive and slow.
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