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
"7. The preparation of getting the machine colours in position, and
setting the machine ready for printing, necessitates the turning out of
at least a ream, or a half ream (five hundred or two hundred and fifty
rolls) at once; whilst the equivalent in hand-printing is fifty to sixty
rolls. It often happens that the design of a machine paper is approved
of, whilst the colourings it is printed in are unsuited to the scheme.
By the hand process, room quantities of even ten to fifteen pieces can
be printed specially at from 15 per cent. to 20 per cent. advance in
price, while the increase in cost for such a small quantity in machine
paper would send up the price to ridiculous proportions."
The use of brass pins in the wood blocks is also a revival of the old
method, as you will see from this interesting paragraph from a recent
volume--Lewis F. Day's _Ornament and Its Application_:
"Full and crowded pattern has its uses. The comparatively fussy detail,
which demeans a fine material, helps to redeem a mean one.
"Printed wall-paper, for example, or common calico, wants detail to
give it a richness which, in itself, it has not. In printed cotton, flat
colours look dead and lifeless. The old cotton printers had what they
called a 'pruning roller,' a wooden roller (for hand-printing) into
which brass pins or wires were driven. The dots printed from this roller
relieved the flatness of the printed colours, and gave 'texture' to it.
William Morris adopted this idea of dotting in his cretonne and
wall-paper design with admirable effect. It became, in his hands, an
admirable convention, in place of natural shading. The interest of a
pattern is enhanced by the occurrence at intervals of appropriate
figures; but with every recurrence of the same figure, human or animal,
its charm is lessened until, at last, the obvious iteration becomes, in
most cases, exasperating.
"And yet, in the face of old Byzantine, Sicilian, and other early woven
patterns with their recurring animals, and of Mr. Crane's consummately
ornamental patterns, it cannot be said that repeated animal (and even
human) forms do not make satisfactory pattern.
"For an illustration of this, look at the wall-paper design by Crane:
'This is the House that Jack built.' It seems, at first glance, to be a
complicated ornamental design; after long searching, you at last see
plainly every one of the characters in that jingle that children so
love."
William Morris, and his interest in wall-paper hanging, must be spoken
of, "For it was Morris who made this a truly valuable branch of domestic
ornamentation. If, in some other instances, he was rather the restorer
and infuser of fresh life into arts fallen into degeneracy, he was
nothing short of a creator in the case of wall-paper design, which, as a
serious decorative art, owes its existence to him before anyone else."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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