PRESERVATION OF WALLPAPERS AS PARTS OF INTERIORS

Historic types of wallpaper and decorative schemes of interiors
landscapes and ornamental cartouches. 94 (Fig. 16)
As the panels were produced separately, this allowed a
decorator to create a setting according to the size of a room or
personal taste. Arabesque wallpapers were commonly fixed on
a monochromatic wallpaper above a dado. If the wallpapers
were presented as separate panels, they might have been sided
by pilasters and framed by cornices, borders or mouldings.
Besides symmetrical arabesque designs, full- or half-drop patterns,
integrating symmetrically arranged motifs, were used to
embellish walls as separate panels. (Fig. 17) Besides decorating
walls, arabesque panels were frequently used to cover folding
screens, which were very popular during the 18th century.
A type of decoration that was considered characteristic
to English Neo-Classical interiors was the print room, which
combined graphic prints and trompe-l’oeil frames, festoons
and other decorative details into a finely arranged setting. The
fashion started in the middle of the 18th century and employed
various graphic prints, which were pasted over monochromatic
painted or papered walls. By the 1770s this fashion had reached
the continent. 95
Although the print rooms that have survived are found in
aristocratic houses, it is not certain that such decorations were
not also used in interiors of lower social class homes. 96 Simpler
print rooms featured black-and-white prints pasted in rows
next to each other. In more extravagant cases, the prints were
integrated into a harmonic decoration with trompe l’oeil paper
cut-outs depicting frames, garlands, swags, bows and chains.
(Fig. 18, Fig. 19)
Print rooms usually featured a selection of prints: engravings,
etchings, mezzotints, aquatints and, later, lithographs pasted
onto coloured paper backgrounds in symmetrical arrangements. 97
94
Véronique de Bruignac – La Hogue, “Arabesques and Allegories: French Decorative
Panels” in The Papered Wall. The History, Patterns and Techniques of Wallpaper, ed.
by Lesley Hoskins (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 2005), 78.
95
Alfred P. Hagemann, Wilhelmine von Lichtenau (1753–1820). Von der Mätresse zur
Mäzenin (Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2007), 282.
96
Julie Fitzgerald, “The Georgian Print Room Explored” in The Wallpaper History Review,
2008, 16.
97
Ibid., 14.
54