PRESERVATION OF WALLPAPERS AS PARTS OF INTERIORS

Introduction
if this is not possible, mounting a wallpaper in a new location
or preserving it in a museum should be considered instead.
Formerly, when period rooms were restored or re-created, a
common idea was to make a room look new, with freshly painted
woodwork and reproduced wallpapers. During the 1950s, 1960s
and 1970s the most popular solution was to paint the walls of
an 18th or early 19th century house white. 6 This approach led
to destroying a large amount of original material and conveyed
the wrong impression of historic interiors.
The importance of researching and preserving historic
wall covers as integral parts of interiors has been increasingly
acknowledged during the last forty years. The growth of specialized
interest is illustrated, for instance, by numerous case
studies and scientific articles published at the end of the 1970s
and the beginning of the 1980s in the Journal of the American
Institute for Conservation (JAIC) and in the Journal of Paper
Conservation, published by Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft
von der -Archiv, Bibliothek und Grafikrestauratoren (IADA), an
association of paper conservators.
In Estonia, researching and preserving historic wallpapers
have become gradually more relevant in recent years. So
far, four theses at the bachelor level have been written about
wallpapers. The thesis of Sofia Pantelejeva (1997), a student of
Tallinn University, focused on the historic paper wall covers in
historic interiors of Tallinn during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Her work focused on the historic examples found in the
Old Town and the neighbourhood areas of Tallinn. In her work,
she has made an attempt at a style-critical analysis and dating
of wallpaper samples. The other three theses were written by
students of the Tartu Art College: Kristiina Ribelus, Kristel Kevvai
and Liis Tamm.
Kristiina Ribelus (2007) researched various options of producing
wallpaper. A collection of modern wallpapers was created
to accompany the theoretical part of the thesis, providing
an overview of the history of wallpapers.
6
Nylander, Fabrics and Wallpapers for Historic Buildings, 14.
17