Old Time Wall Papers Part 1

Old Time Wall Papers.

by Katherine Abbott Sanborn.

INTRODUCTORY.

If a book has ever been written on this subject it has been impossible to discover; and to get reliable facts for a history of the origin and development of the art of making wall-papers has been a serious task, although the result seems scanty and superficial. Some friends may wonder at the lack of fascinating bits of gossip, stories of rosy romance and somber tragedy in connection with these papers. But those who chatted, danced, flirted, wept or plotted in the old rooms are long since dust, and although the "very walls have ears" they have not the gift of speech. But my collection of photographs is something entirely unique and will increase in value every year. The numerous photographers, to whom I have never appealed in vain, are regarded by me as not only a skillful but a saintly cla.s.s of men.

I am greatly indebted to Miss Mary M. Brooks of Salem and Miss Mary H.

Buckingham of Boston for professional a.s.sistance. Many others have most kindly helped me by offers of photographs and interesting facts concerning the papers and their histories. But I am especially indebted to Mrs. Frederick C. Bursch, who has given much of her time to patient research, to the verification or correction of doubtful statements, and has accomplished a difficult task in arranging and describing the photographs. Without her enthusiastic and skillful a.s.sistance, my collection and text would have lacked method and finish.

To the many, both acquaintances and strangers, who have volunteered a.s.sistance and have encouraged when discouragement was imminent, sending bracing letters and new-old pictures, I can only quote with heartfelt thanks the closing lines of the verse written by Foote, the English actor, to be posted conspicuously to attract an audience to his benefit--

Like a grate full of coals I'll glow A great full house to see; And if I am not grateful, too, A great fool I shall be.

I

FROM MUD WALLS AND CANVAS TENTS TO DECORATIVE PAPERS

I

FROM MUD WALLS AND CANVAS TENTS

TO DECORATIVE PAPERS

"How very interesting! Most attractive and quite unique! I supposed all such old papers had gone long ago. How did you happen to think of such an odd subject, and how ever could you find so many fine old specimens?

Do you know where the very first wall-paper was made?"

These are faint echoes of the questions suggested by my collection of photographs of wall-papers of the past. The last inquiry, which I was unable to answer, stimulated me to study, that I might learn something definite as to the origin and development of the art of making such papers.

Before this, when fancying I had found a really new theme, I was surprised to discover that every one, from Plato and Socrates to Emerson, Ruskin and Spencer, had carefully gleaned over the same ground, until the amount of material became immense and unmanageable. Not so now. I appealed in vain to several public libraries; they had nothing at all on the subject. Poole's Index--that precious store-house of information--was consulted, but not one magazine article on my theme could be found. I then sent to France, England and Italy, and employed professional lookers-up of difficult topics; but little could be secured. The few who had studied paper hangings were very seldom confident as to positive dates and facts.

One would seem safe in starting with China, as paper was certainly invented there, and many of the earliest designs were of Chinese scenes; but the honor is also claimed for j.a.pan and Persia and Egypt. It is difficult to decide in view of the varying testimony.

I was a.s.sured by a j.a.panese expert, who consulted a friend for the facts, that neither the Chinese nor the j.a.panese have ever used paper to cover their walls. At the present day, the inner walls of their houses are plastered white, and usually have a strip of white paper running around the bottom, about a foot and a half high.

On the other hand, Clarence Cook, in his book, _What Shall We Do With Our Walls?_, published in 1880, says as to the origin of wall-paper: "It may have been one of the many inventions borrowed from the East, and might be traced, like the introduction of porcelain, to the Dutch trade with China and j.a.pan." And he finds that the j.a.panese made great use of paper, their walls being lined with this material, and the divisions between the rooms made largely, if not entirely, by means of screens covered with paper or silk. j.a.panese wall-paper does not come in rolls like ours, but in pieces, a little longer than broad, and of different sizes. He adds:

_PLATE II._

One of the cruder papers popular a hundred years ago; containing three groups of figures engaged in rural occupations. Beside the gray ground this paper contains eleven shades of color, roughly applied, with little attention paid to register.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"What makes it more probable that our first European notion of wall-papers came from j.a.pan, is the fact that the first papers made in Holland and then introduced into England and France, were printed in these small sizes [about three feet long by fifteen inches wide]. Nor was it until some time in the eighteenth century that the present mode of making long rolls was adopted. These early wall-papers were printed from blocks, and were only one of many modifications and adaptations of the block printing which gave us our first books and our first wood-cuts.

"The printing of papers for covering walls is said to have been introduced into Spain and Holland about the middle of the sixteenth century. And I have read, somewhere, that this mode of printing the patterns on small pieces of paper was an imitation of the Spanish squares of stamped and painted leather with which the grandees of Spain covered their walls, a fas.h.i.+on that spread all over Europe.

"We are told that wall-paper was first used in Europe as a subst.i.tute for the tapestry so commonly employed in the middle ages, partly as a protection against the cold and damp of the stone walls of the houses, partly, no doubt, as an ornament."

But here is something delightfully positive from A. Blanchet's _Essai sur L'Histoire du Papier et de sa Fabrication_, Exposition retrospective de la Papetier, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900.

Blanchet says that paper was invented in China by Tsai Loon, for purposes of writing. He used fibres of bark, hemp, rags, etc. In 105 A.

D. he reported to the government on his process, which was highly approved. He was given the honorary t.i.tle of Marquis and other honors.

The first paper book was brought to j.a.pan from Corea, then a part of China, in 285. The conquest of Turkestan by the Arabs, through which they learned the manufacture of paper, came in the battle fought on the banks of the River Tharaz, in July, 751. Chinese captives brought the art to Samarcand, from which place it spread rapidly to other parts of the Arabian Empire. Damascus was one of the first places to receive it.

In Egypt, paper began to take the place of papyrus in the ninth century, and papyrus ceased to be used in the tenth. The Arabian paper was made of rags, chiefly linen, and sized with wheat starch. European paper of the thirteenth century shows, under the microscope, fibres of flax and hemp, with traces of cotton. About 1400, animal glue was first used for sizing. The common belief that Arabian and early European paper was made of cotton is a mistake. There has never been any paper made of raw cotton, and cotton paper anywhere is exceptional. In 1145, when the troops of Abd el Mounin were about to attack the capital of Fez, the inhabitants covered the vault of the mihrab of the mosque with paper, and put upon this a coating of plaster, in order to preserve from destruction the fine carvings which are still the admiration of visitors. The mihrab of an Arabic mosque is a vaulted niche or alcove, in which the altar stands and towards which the wors.h.i.+ppers look while they pray. This is probably the earliest approach to the use of wall-paper and shows the excellent quality of the paper.

Herbert Spencer states that "Dolls, blue-books, paper-hangings are lineally descended from the rude sculpture paintings in which the Egyptians represented the triumphs and wors.h.i.+p of their G.o.d-kings." No doubt this is true, but the beginning of paper, and probably of wall-paper, was in China.

Paper made of cotton and other vegetable fibres by the Chinese was obtained by the Arabs in trade, through Samarcand. When they captured that city, in 704 A.D. they learned the process from Chinese captives there, and soon spread it over their empire. It was known as "Charta Damascena" in the Middle Ages, and was extensively made also in Northern Africa. The first paper made in Europe was manufactured by the Moors in Spain, at Valencia, Toledo, and Xativa. At the decline of Moorish power, the Christians took it up, but their work was not so good. It was introduced into Italy through the Arabs in Sicily; and the Laws of Alphonso, 1263, refer to it as "cloth parchment." The earliest doc.u.ments on this thick "cotton" paper date from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as a deed of King Roger of Sicily, dated 1102, shows. When made further north, other materials, such as rags and flax, were used.

The first mention of rag paper, in a tract of Peter, Abbott of Cluny from 1122 to 1150, probably means woolen. Linen paper was not made until in the fourteenth century.

The Oriental papers had no water mark,--which is really a wire mark.

Water-mark paper originated in the early fourteenth century, when paper-making became an European industry; and a considerable international trade can be traced by means of the water marks.

The French Encyclopaedia corroborates Blanchet's statement that the common notion that the Arabic and early European papers were made of cotton is a mistake; the microscope shows rag and flax fibres in the earliest.

Frederic Aumonier says: "From the earliest times man has longed to conceal the baldness of mud walls, canvas tents or more substantial dwellings, by something of a decorative character. Skins of animals, the trophies of the chase, were probably used by our remote ancestors for ages before wall-paintings and sculptures were thought of. The extreme antiquity of both of these latter methods of wall decoration has recently received abundant confirmation from the valuable work done by the Egyptian Research Department, at Hierakonopolis, where wall-paintings have been discovered in an ancient tomb, the date of which has not yet been determined, but which is probably less than seven thousand years old; and by the discovery of ancient buildings under the scorching sand dunes of the great Sahara, far away from the present boundary line of habitable and cultivated land. The painted decorations on the walls of some of the rooms in these old-world dwellings have been preserved by the dry sand, and remain almost as fresh as they were on the day they left the hand of the artist, whose bones have long since been resolved into their native dust."

From the Encyclopaedia Britannica I condense the long article on "Mural Decoration":

There is scarcely one of the numerous branches of decorative art which has not at some time or other been applied to the ornamentation of wall-surfaces.

I. Reliefs sculptured in marble or stone; the oldest method of wall decoration.

II. Marble veneer; the application of thin marble linings to wall surfaces, these linings often being highly variegated.

III. Wall linings of glazed bricks or tiles. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Moslems of Persia brought their art to great perfection and used it on a large scale, chiefly for interiors. In the most beautiful specimens, the natural growth of trees and flowers is imitated. About 1600 A. D., this art was brought to highest perfection.

IV. Wall coverings of hard stucco, frequently enriched with relief and further decorated with delicate paintings in gold and colors, as at the Alhambra at Granada and the Alcazar at Seville.

V. Sgraffito; a variety of stucco work used chiefly in Italy, from the sixteenth century down. A coat of stucco is made black by admixture of charcoal. Over this a second very thin coat of white stucco is laid. The drawing is made to appear in black on a white ground, by cutting away the white skin enough to show the black undercoat.

VI. Stamped leather; magnificent and expensive, used during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in Italy, Spain, France, and later in England.

VII. Painted cloth. In _King Henry IV._, Falstaff says his soldiers are "slaves, as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth." Canvas, painted to imitate tapestry, was used both for ecclesiastical and domestic hangings. English mediaeval inventories contain such items as "stayned cloth for hangings"; "paynted cloth with stories and batailes"; and "paynted cloths of beyond-sea-work." The most important existing example is the series of paintings of the Triumph of Julius Caesar, now in Hampton Court. These designs were not meant to be executed in tapestry, but were complete as wall-hangings. G.o.don, in _Peinture sur Toile_, says: "The painted canva.s.ses kept at the Hotel Dieu at Rheims were done in the fifteenth century, probably as models for woven tapestries. They have great artistic merit. The subjects are religious." Painted cloths were sometimes dyed in a manner similar to those Indian stuffs which were afterwards printed and are now called chintzes. It is recorded somewhere, that the weaving industry was established at Mulhouse (Rixheim) by workers who left Rheims at a time when laws were pa.s.sed there to restrict the manufacture of painted cloths, because there was such a rage for it that agriculture and other necessary arts were neglected.

VIII. Printed hangings and wall-papers. The printing of various textiles with dye-colors and mordaunts is probably one of the most ancient of the arts. Pliny describes a dyeing process employed by the ancient Egyptians, in which the pattern was probably formed by printing from blocks. The use of printed stuffs is of great antiquity among the Hindus and Chinese, and was practised in Western Europe in the thirteenth century, and perhaps earlier. The South Kensington Museum has thirteenth-century specimens of block-printed linen made in Sicily, with beautiful designs. Later, toward the end of the fourteenth century, a great deal of block-printed linen was made in Flanders and was imported largely into England.