Old Time Wall Papers: An Account of the Pictorial Papers on Our Forefathers' Walls with a Study of the Historical Development of Wall Paper Making and Decoration — John Shaqi
Old Time Wall Papers: An Account of the Pictorial Papers on Our Forefathers' Walls with a Study of the Historical Development of Wall Paper Making and DecorationSanborn, Kate
History
Old Time Wall Papers: An Account of the Pictorial Papers on Our Forefathers' Walls with a Study of the Historical Development of Wall Paper Making and Decoration
Sanborn, Kate
Interior decoration -- History; Wallpaper
A brief magazine article on my new enthusiasm, illustrated with
photographs of papers I knew about, was received with surprising
interest. My mail-bag came crowded, and I was well-nigh "snowed in," as
De Quincy put it, by fascinating letters from men and women who rejoiced
in owning papers like those of my illustrations, or had heard of others
equally fine and equally venerable, and with cordial invitations to
journey here and there to visit unknown friends and study their
wall-papers, the coloring good as new after a hundred years or more. It
was in this unexpected and most agreeable way that I heard of treasures
at Windsor, Vermont; Claremont, New Hampshire; Taunton, Massachusetts,
and quaint old Nantucket, and was informed that my special paper, with
the scenes from the Bay of Naples (represented so faithfully that one
familiar with the Italian reality could easily recognize every one) was
a most popular subject with the early purchaser and was still on the
walls of a dozen or more sitting-rooms.
The Reverend Wallace Nutting, of Providence, whose fame as an artistic
photographer is widespread, sent me a picture of a parlor in St.
Johnsbury, Vermont, where he found this paper. Three women dressed in
old-fashioned style, even to the arrangement of their hair, are seated
at table, enjoying a cup of tea. An old tabby is napping cosily in a
soft-cushioned chair. And above, on the right, Vesuvius is pouring forth
the usual volumes of smoke. A fine old mahogany side-board, at the foot
of the volcano, decorated with decanters and glasses large and small,
presents an inviting picture.
The house at Hillsboro Bridge, New Hampshire, where Ex-Governor
Benjamin Pierce lived for years, and where his son, Franklin Pierce,
passed a happy boyhood, has this paper, and several similar letters show
how generally it was admired. Mrs. Lawrence, of Boston, wrote:
"I send by this mail a package of pictures, taken by my daughter, of the
Italian wall-paper on her grandfather's old home in Exeter, N. H. The
house is now owned by the Academy and used as a dormitory. The views
which I enclose have never been published. We have two or three
remarkable specimens of wall-paper made in India a hundred and fifty
years ago; the strips are hanging on the wall, nailed up."
The Italian paper proved to be my old friend Vesuvius and his bay. An
Exeter professor also wrote describing the same paper and adding
translations of the Greek inscriptions on the monuments.
Friends would often write of such a wonderful specimen at some town or
village. I would write to the address given and be told of this Bay of
Naples paper again. They were all brought over and put on at about the
same time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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