PRESERVATION OF WALLPAPERS AS PARTS OF INTERIORS

Historic types of wallpaper and decorative schemes of interiors
In comparison to the modest premises most commonly
formed by regional traditions, manors were often influenced by
diverse and far-reaching ideas. There is no reason to believe that
residential architecture in Estonia was less fashionable than in
Western Europe 137 or in Russia. Most of the representative interiors
were acquired by the Russian-speaking or German-speaking
nobility, who had strong family and business connections in the
Russian Empire as well as in German-speaking countries. It was
also common to order architecture magazines or to travel and
study abroad. Thus it can be assumed that fashionable interiors
seen abroad shaped the understanding of modern materials and
interior design, which were implemented at home.
The surviving interiors from the last three decades of the
18th century and the beginning of the 19th century present the
aesthetic principles of the German Neo-Classical style. Rooms
created during that time have a soft and intimate atmosphere.
The most carefully decorated rooms of a Neo-Classical house
were commonly the vestibule and rooms on the piano nobile. The
walls were usually segmented by low dados and upper areas,
which were either divided into symmetrically arranged panels
or covered with fabric or wallpaper. Similar principles were
implemented in Russian interiors where, besides using plain
papers, wallpapers imitating drapes and printed cotton fabrics
were widely used. 138 They either covered a whole wall above a
dado or separate panels. The wallpapers were either attached
directly to a wall or pasted onto a layer of canvas attached to a
wooden frame. 139
Besides a few finds of plain papers, the best example of
Neo-Classical wallpaper was discovered in Nunne 2 in Tallinn.
Its pattern is similar to a French papier en feuille or an English
print room decoration, combined with symmetrically arranged
framed images on a blue background. Two images can be
detected: orange griffins with a lyre on a black background,
137
Hein, Eesti mõisaarhitektuur. Historitsismist juugendini, 16.
138
Игорь Aндреевич Киселев, Архитектурные детали в русском зодчестве XVIII–XIX веков :
справочник архитектора-реставратора (Москва: Academia, 2005), 203.
139
Ibid., 204.
83