The pavilions where they were lodged were described by the official recorder of the embassy George Staunton. An example of how Chinese wallpaper could convey such useful information is given by William Marshall, in his The Rural Economy of Yorkshire , in which he discusses the origins of the winnowing machine.
I have seen it upon an India paper drawn with sufficient accuracy, to shew that the draughtsman was intimately acquainted with the uses of it. Nor was he buying a product of Chinese imagination. Perhaps there was some irony too in the fact that this paper showed Chinese goods such as porcelain, tea and silk which Europeans were desperately keen to imitate, acquired by an ambassador who had failed to entice the Chinese into buying European goods.
Coutts kept closely in touch with public affairs at home and throughout the world, through leading politicians and by maintaining a close network of Scottish friends and relatives abroad. As Macartney brought him wallpaper from China, so Lord Minto who was Governor General of India between , brought him news from India. A second failed mission to the Emperor of China, led by William Pitt Amherst while Ambassador Extraordinary to China in , led to the gift of another Chinese wallpaper, which was sent by Amherst to the artist Henry Chamberlain Chamberlain accompanied his father, the Consul General of England, to Brazil in The Embassy, which was financed by the East India Company was sent to redress interference with their trade by the Viceroy of Canton.
The Chinese wallpapers that lie at the heart of these missions, as material evidence of superior manufacturing, were witness to both the failure of gift giving from West to East, and of successful gifting and commerce from East to West. Figure 7. Portrait miniature of Hugh Scott , watercolour on ivory, by Andrew Roberston, Picture courtesy of Lane Fine Art.
The vivid green Chinese wallpaper that hangs in the Drawing Room at Abbotsford in the Scottish Borders might strike the modern visitor as incongruous in a baronial antiquarian interior, created by the famous author Sir Walter Scott between and his death. However its presence not only illustrates the power of the gift, but also how intimately Asian goods and Scottish history could be intertwined.
He had been made Captain of the East Indiaman, Ceres , which made several voyages to China, until it was relegated to hulk in Figure 8. Painting of the East Indiaman Ceres, by William Huggins , oil painting 30 x 48 inches 75 x cm in original gilt frame. Provenance: by descent from the captain of the ship, Hugh Scott of Draycott. At this stage the different sheets did not overlap or link up visually, so Scrutton cut off the side margins, around the edges of the trees and plants, so that there are no breaks in the scenery and it looks like a continuous garden panorama.
Some of the same panels were used at Ightham Mote, but the visual rhythm is slightly different, presumably because a different paper-hanger was involved here. Fragments from yet another woodblock-printed wallpaper have miraculously survived at Uppark. There was a disastrous fire in the house in , and these fragments were found among the debris, having emerged from beneath a later wallpaper. The fragments were carefully conserved along with the other salvageable contents of the house, and in spite of their singed edges the colours are actually remarkably fresh, as they were covered over and thus protected from light for a long time.
Smaller Chinese prints and paintings were also being used in the s and s to create decorative collages. The paper-hangers again showed considerable artistry in arranging and combining the images. In the Study at Saltram Chinese paintings on paper were combined with prints to create a beautifully symmetrical arrangement. In this there is an interesting correlation with the taste for objects and pictures brought back from the Grand Tour, which flourished alongside the fashion for things Chinese.
Research into the dating of these prints and printed wallpapers has indicated that they ceased to be imported after about and were replaced with fully painted wallpapers. Many of the most sophisticated printing workshops were concentrated in the cities of the Yangzi River delta, further north, and from the late s it may have become uneconomical for westerners to obtain the products from those workshops. Instead, painting workshops in Guangzhou appear to have filled the gap with various types of painted wallpapers.
Some of these new painted wallpapers depicted landscapes, such as one at Blickling Hall, which was probably hung around Even though it is fully painted, it actually consists of four almost identical landscape sequences, suggesting that the painters were copying sets of master images.
A number of different painters would have worked on any one wallpaper, each specialising in certain elements, such as architecture, rockwork, foliage or human figures. Certain painting workshops must have specialised in bird-and-flower wallpapers. The wallpaper in the State Bedroom at Erddig, probably hung in the s, has a deep green background, but the bird and flower motifs are almost identical to those in the wallpaper at Nostell Priory.
Other examples of this type survive elsewhere, suggesting that painters must have been producing them in some numbers, based on master models. The botanist Joseph Banks praised the Chinese wallpaper painters for what he saw as their scientific accuracy.
But the presence of an undoubtedly mythical Chinese phoenix in the wallpaper at Nostell proves that the Chinese artists were treating this scenery not so much as a realistic copy of nature, but rather as an elegant and visually compelling network of auspicious symbols. The coloured paper was coated with patterns of glue on to which was sprinkled the shearings of wool left from cloth making. Historic examples are surprisingly attractive. The mid 18th Century saw a massive expansion of Chinese workshops making woodblock prints in a wallpaper format to cater to the Western love of everything Eastern.
These bird-and-flower export wallpapers had brightly coloured backgrounds. Aimed squarely at the European market, they became a defining feature of the English country house frequently mentioned in letters and diaries.
Examples survive at Ightham Mote and Felbrigg, where the wallpaper in the Chinese Bedroom is recorded as having been hung in by a London paper-hanger called John Scrutton.
The printing is so fine that the papers were originally assumed to be hand painted rather than block printed. Such luxuries did not escape notice. In a property tax on wallpaper had been introduced under Queen Anne and remained in force for years. Forging wallpaper stamps or anything else was by among the long list of offences punishable by death. In dodging the tax by simplifying designs into stencils, English manufacturers lost out badly to the French whose repertoire was endless and boundless.
In addition to brilliant copies of textiles, there were panoramic landscapes, battle scenes, grottos and Gothic and Rococo Revival designs. The repeal of the tax, together with the introduction of mass-production printing techniques in the Victorian period galvanised the English wallpaper industry once more.
New technologies allowed for greater illusionism as well as cheaper production of the panoramics. While the designs of William Morris might today appear to epitomise the Victorian look, he was in fact appalled by the vulgar panoramics of the industrial age. Fond Rose by Zuber. The French company has been creating wallpaper since Credit: Zuber. In the s when a number of child deaths were attributed to wallpaper, William Morris refused to accept they had been poisoned.
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