Old House Interiors

A Short History of  Wallpaper

Introduction

Awareness of the extensive use of wallpapers in American homes from the 18th through the middle of the 20th centuries has increased dramatically in recent decades. Styles and fashions of wallpaper and how it was used in interior decoration have varied from century to century and decade to decade, but an interest in the styles of the past has been a factor in the design and production of walllpaper from a relatively early date. The Gothic Revival wallpapers of the 1830s and 1840s, for example, were based on the architectural wallpapers of the 1760s and 1770s. Even William Morris, often credited with reinventing wallpaper as art in the late 1800s, used motifs and patterns from medieval manuscripts, 16th century herbals, and Renaissance designs.

Today, just about every wallpaper manufacturer offers traditional and even reproduction patterns. However, if you want a truly authentic period look for your project, you should be familiar with the historical variations in wallpaper design, production, and usage.

This guide, the first in our series of historic wallpaper guides, provides a brief history of wallpapers. See our Historic Wallpaper Style Chart and Glossary of Terms for additional information about historically appropriate styles, patterns, and colors. Not every paper touted as historic or of a certain period represents authentic designs, colors, motifs, or printing methods of that time. Our guides will provide you with the background knowledge you need to determine what look and style is appropriate for your project. (We wish we could show you more pictures but we have used the maximum allowed by eBay and have tried not to duplicate pictures in our other guides as one way to give you more actual examples of historic wallpapers.)

The Early Years 

Wall decoration dates back as far as the earliest cave paintings. People have used leather and fabric hung on their walls and windows to keep the drafts out -- and what little heat there was in -- for centuries. By the middle ages, the wealthy were using elaborate tapestries in their castles and palaces for this purpose.  Some historians believe that wallpaper was introduced as a less expensive substitute for tapestries, but we find that claim dubious for three reasons. First, it is unlikely that paper, even backed with linen as it was in its earliest versions, would do as good as heavy tapestries to ward off drafts. Secondly, the claim ignores the fact that the Chinese glued decorative rice paper on their walls as early as 200 BC, and developed color block printing prior to the 5th century, predating the European practice by about a thousand years. The Arabs learned to block print paper from the Chinese and the skill had spread quickly throughout the mideast long before it reached Europe. Thirdly, wallpaper did not became very popular in England until Henry VIII’s excommunication from the Catholic Church resulted in a fall in trade with Catholic Europe. Unable to import tapestries and lacking any tapestry manufacturers in England, the English gentry and aristocracy turned to wallpaper.

                

The earliest known record of wallpaper in the Western world dates to 1481, when King Louis XI of France commissioned Jean Bourdichon to paint 50 rolls of paper with angels on a blue background so that he could take his wall decorations with him as he moved from one castle to another. Unfortunately, none of that paper itself has survived.  The earliest known wallpaper that still exists was discovered in 1911 on the beams at Christ’s College in Cambridge, England. It dates to 1509 and features an Italian pomegranate design printed by woodcut on the back of a proclamation issued by Henry VIII. At the same time, across the English Channel, French craftsmen were producing single sheets of decorated papers for the middle-class market. However, these served more as pictures that covered cracks in the wall than a wall treatment.

In the late 1500s, the first paperhangers’ guild was formed in France. Sixteenth century “wallpaper” was either a geometric pattern printed by a single carved wood block or more complicated designs of crests, urns, and flowers printed by several blocks. Outlined designs were printed in black on individual sheets of paper and color was then applied with a stencil.

The Seventeenth Century

Though called wallpaper, the early versions were not attached directly to the wall. Instead, the individual sheets were pasted onto linen and then attached to the walls with copper tacks, with or without a wood frame. Wallpaper borders were used to hide those tacks and did not come into its own as a decorative element until some time later.

In 1675, wallpaper as we know it is considered to have been invented by Jean-Michel Papillon, a French engraver who was the first to print block designs in continuous matching patterns. Individual sheets were joined together in groups of 12 or more to form a roll, enabling faster printing and complex designs.

The Eighteenth Century                                                                                   

Prior to the 1700s, wallpaper was usually used in less important rooms, with the walls in “public” rooms hung with fabric. In the 18th century, with advances in printing and the commissioning of artists to design custom papers, wallpaper was no longer relegated to private quarters and the demand increased. At first, in addition to flocked papers that imitated cut velvet, trompe l'oeil papers (papers that “fooled the eye”) of architectural details , marble, and wood were most fashionable, and were often used with borders depicting swags of fabric or tassels. .

In the early 18th century, the most beautiful and extravagant wallpapers in Europe and the American colonies came from China. "Chinoiserie " objects were in fashion and very much sought after. Interestingly, Chinese homes were completely devoid of patterned or painted wallpapers. Scholars believe that sets of painted wallpaper were specially created by Chinese merchants to give as gifts to their European trading partners. These hand-painted papers were much higher in quality than their European counterparts of the time and provided the impetus for improvements in the wallpaper industry, especially in France.

In 1712, because the use of wallpaper had become so prevalent, the English introduced a tax on paper that was "painted, printed or stained to serve as hangings".  To outwit the taxman, wallpapers were being colored by hand after being hung on the wall. Still the industry grew and in 1773, Parliament repealed the tax, but customs duties were still levied. In the early 1800s, falsification of wallpaper customs stamps was a crime punishable by death. To deal with the tax, English manufacturers sought to increase sales by catering to the masses by simplifying their designs and producing cheaper products.

This allowed the French to maintain their firm hold on the high-end design of custom papers. They paid their designers well and produced incredible papers. Perhaps the most in-demand was Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, who became a “Manufacture Royale.” When his Paris factory was attacked during the French Revolution, Réveillon fled to England where he continued to produce his characteristically graceful designs. The Réveillon hallmark was a long vertical arabesque design meant to be hung as panels and featuring urns, flowers, dancing figures, swans, birds and beasts flowing upward from a central motif or medallion. He used strong multiple blocks and strong colors of red, mustard, terracotta, green, and azure. Réveillon papers were also imported to the U.S. and can still be seen in some period homes.

The earliest documentation for printing wallpaper in America dates to a December 13,1756 advertisement of John Hickey, “lately from Dublin” whose ad in the New York Mercury noted that he he “stamps or prints paper in the English manner and hangs it so as to harbour no worms.” In 1765 another New Yorker, John Rugar, is recorded as having begun the manufacture of wallpaper and, in 1769, Plunket Fleeson, a Philadelphia upholsterer who had been in business at least since 1739, ran an announcement about the manufacture of American “paper-hangings of all kinds and colors, not inferior to those generally imported and as low in price. Also papier maché, or raised paper mouldings for hangings, in imitation of carving, either colored or gilt…As there is considerable duty imposed on paper-hangings imported here, it cannot be doubted but that everyone amongst us who wishes prosperity to America will give a preference to our own manufacture, especially on the above proposition of equally good and cheap.”  Prior to the American Revolution, English papers were copied but after the Revolutionary war, patriotic themes were very popular in addition to florals, neoclassical motifs, and traditional patterns.

In 1778, sizes of wallpaper began to be standardized when King Louis XVI of France issued a decree specifying that the length of a wallpaper roll should be about 34 feet.  In 1785, Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf, a Frenchman, invented the first wallpaper printing machine. Around the same time, another Frenchman, Nicholas Louis Robert invented a way to make a virtually endless roll of wallpaper from wood pulp instead of cotton and linen fiber, which also made it less costly.

The Nineteenth Century                                                                              

The first wallpaper-printing machine was patented by the British textile printers Potters and Ross in 1839. Each color required a separate roller, and synthetic pigments like ultramarine blue and chrome yellow were used on rolls of continuous paper made from wood pulp instead of cotton-on-linen-rag fiber, greatly reducing the manufacturing costs. The scale of the design was also affected by machine printing, as the circumference of the new rollers was relatively small, so the size of each repeat was reduced.

The patterns of this time imitated scenic tapestries, damasks, toiles and patterned velvet . Chinese style papers with fanciful hand-painted birds, trees, pagodas, figures and landscapes, known as chinoiserie , was also popular. The finest examples were printed in France and used in the homes and palaces of the wealthy on both sides of the Atlantic. Stripes were popular in Napoleonic France and in England and were used lavishly on walls and mitred into intricate designs on ceilings.

Around this time, borders, which had been invented to hide the tacks used to hang fabric-backed paper on a wall, became especially valued because they could visually change a room’s proportions. Many were printed to look like architectural details and were used like cornices and to frame doors, windows, and other features of a room. They could visually raise a ceiling, call attention to a window, and generally substitute for more expensive wood and plaster ornamentation.  Borders were particularly desirable and were used to embellish solid color “plain papers” or painted walls.

      By the 1800s, large scale panoramic scenic papers became popular among the aristocracy in France. Unlike murals, these papers were hand printed with an innumerable number of wood blocks and were very expensive. These scenes usually covered four walls of a room from chair rail to ceiling and were joined to create a continuous non-repeating picture  that told a story.

In 1852, Zuber, a French company, responded to the nationalistic sentiments in the U.S. by adapting their existing “Views of America” series to capitalize on that. Thus, the view of Boston Harbour became the backdrop for the newly added Boston Tea Party and landscapes became battlefields. The adapted series was known as “The War of Independence.” Landscapes never became popular in England since they did not accommodate the preferred British wall decoration of ancestral portraits. But the English wallpaper industry was far from idle.

In 1836, England repealed wallpaper taxation. In 1839, Charles Harold Potter of Lancashire, England invented a four color printing machine that could turn out 400 rolls of wallpaper a day – a pretty magical feat even though we do not know if he is related in any way to THE Harry Potter, but we’d love to find out…if you read this, J. K. Rowling, please let us know!) This breakthrough enabled wallpaper to be applied directly to plaster. By 1850, eight color printing was available and in 1874, the twenty color printing machine was invented. And in 1888, ready-to-use wallpaper paste was introduced. As techology advanced and production increased, prices dropped and more people could afford to use wallpaper in their homes.

In large part because of the availability, affordability, and variety of styles in wallpapers, the tripartite (three part) style of wallpapering that is associated with Victorian décor came into vogue. The wall was divided into three parts: The dado (bottom two to three feet) wall fill (between the dado and the frieze on the main part of the wall), and frieze (a wide border at the top of the wall). Borders were used to separate each section which consisted of distinct yet related patterns.

        Late Nineteenth Century
 
Charles Eastlake’s influential ‘Hints on Household Taste ’, published in 1868, advanced some strong opinions about wallpaper. He condemned illusionistic and pictorial patterns but defended flocks as “the best in design, because they can represent nothing pictorially.” Nevertheless, by the later 19th century flocks were out of fashion, dismissed or even condemned by writers of guides to interior decoration. A writer in the Art Journal in 1889 called the popular wallpaper of the day ‘gaudily gilt monstrosities … or the heavily loaded ‘flocks’ shedding everywhere their poisonous dust.’

Cleanliness had become something of an obsession with the Victorians, and lighter colours and washable ’sanitary’ papers were supplanting the dark velvety flocks, which were relegated to the library or as a background for a picture gallery.

Dark, gloomy, a hindrance to cleanliness and a hazard to health - the fashion for flock paper was in decline among many pundits of good taste but, in defiance or in ignorance of the critics, flocked papers remained popular well into the 1920s. Designs continued to he produced, including papers by Morris, Crane and other fashionable designers of ‘art wallpapers ’.  (Flocked papers are still manufactured today, but they use rayon flock and are their use is more or less limited to restoration projects in historic buildings.)

By the late 1800s, William Morris, Owen Jones, and other designers began to react to the excesses of the high Victorian era (mid-1800s), arguing for a return to craftsmanship and “good taste.” Their flat-patterned papers, hand-printed by the wood block method, came to symbolize Art Nouveau . However, their designs are far more popular today than they were at that time. Production methods were too expensive for mass consumption and, frankly, their designs were not widely appreciated by the general population of the time and had limited impact, especially in America, where the 1890's witnessed a general return to mass production of scrollwork and naturalistic styles in pastels and color blendings similar to those of the mid-century.

Three unique types of late 19th-century wallcoverings were far more popular than the “art papers.” The first is "Lincrusta Walton," invented in the 1870s by Frederick Walton, an Englishman. Lincrusta is a composition, which like linoleum, is based on linseed oil. Very thick and strong, and patterned in high relief, it was sold both colored, and plain, to be painted after hanging. In 1882 a Connecticut company was organized to manufacture Lincrusta, advertised as “the indestructible wall covering,” in the U.S.

The second type of wallcovering that was particularly popular during the late 19th century was Japanese "Leather Paper." The heavy gauge paper was highly embossed and varnished, and featured richly colored and gilded decorations. It became so realistic that it was difficult to distinguish the imitation from the real thing. Leather paper was hung on walls, but also used to decorate the bamboo and imitation bamboo furniture that was popular during the period.

The third category of papers, patented in 1877, and popular into the 1920's was "Ingrain" paper. The paper was made from mixed cotton and woolen rags which were dyed before pulping. The process gave a thick, roughly textured "ingrained" coloring. Similar papers with rough grainy surface were known as "oatmeal papers."
The Twentieth Century                                                                  

As grand and elaborate as wallpaper was in the Victorian Era, the 1920s remain its Golden Age, with over 400 million rolls sold during that decade. Again, technological advancements were key: wallpaper pasting machines appeared in the early 1900s and the first mechanical silk screen machine was invented in 1920. For the first time, wallpaper designers did not just borrow from the past. Futurist and Cubist designs were produced and there were both modern and traditional styles available. By the late 1920s wallpaper had become so ubiquitous that the elite turned up their noses at it and reverted to using silks and painted finishes on their walls.

Photomurals, or huge reproduction photographs in color and in black and white, which first appeared on the market in the 1930s, did not become successful until after WWII. Photomurals filled one wall with a vista of American mountain ranges and other natural wonders by photographers such as Margaret Bourke White, Edward Steichen and Ansel Adams.

After WWII, the use of plastic resins revolutionized the wallpaper industry. Vinyl wallpaper , introduced in 1947, offered increased stain resistance, washability, durability, and strength. Pre-pasted papers first appeared in the early 1950s, but by that time wallpaper was beginning to fall into disfavor. Modernism was all about spareness and embellishments, including wallpaper, were frowned upon. 

The 21st Century

Today, in the early 21st century, we talk of wallcoverings instead of wallpapers and the field encompasses materials not even dreamed of by wallpaper manufacturers of the past. Recent advances in digital, photo, and printing technologies have allowed modern printing facilities to easily create one-of-a-kind or custom papers and to replicate historic designs . (However, it should be noted that many purists and old house restorers prefer those printed by hand the old-fashioned way, either with blocks or silk screens.)

Wallpapers/coverings are once again enjoying widespread popularity, at least in part as a reaction to sterile work environments and cookie-cutter homes and apartments. In addition, wallpaper fits every budget  (especially if you take advantage of the fabulous deals on ebay) and is an easy way to express your creativity and create an unprecedented variety of  looks. Nothing effects the mood and style of a room like your choice of wallpaper.

If the choices are overwhelming or you aren’t quite sure how to achieve the look you want with wallpaper, see our Guide to Wallpaper for Historic Decorating.