Kate Greenaway was one of the most popular children’s illustrators of the late Victorian period, a rival of Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott. From 1879, when she published her first children’s book Under the Window to her death in 1901, she illustrated over 50 publications from nursery rhyme books to ABC’s to her own annual...

The Cooper-Hewitt has several wallpapers designed by Christine Tarkowski and produced by the Thematic Wallpaper Company which she founded in 1992. Like many of Tarkowski’s designs, this wallpaper features an everyday object, in this case a drain, to serve as its unconventional motif. Other wallpapers feature hands, meatballs, cacti, and rose thorns seemingly taken from...

I love the contrast in this paper by Jacquemart et Bénard between the monochrome neoclassical ornament and the vibrantly-colored animals. This sidewall hovers on the border between the austere Empire style of the first decades of the 19th century and the mid-century taste for highly-detailed, brightly-colored designs. The overall layout of this paper, with its...

This beautiful sidewall is a great example of the Rococo Revival style at its most wild and vivid. Its design, a repeating landscape vignette floating in space bordered by sprays of flowers, is common in 18th century wallpapers. This paper also uses the old-fashioned technique of block-printing, despite coming from a time when machine-printing dominated...

This beautiful panel is from a scenic called Le jardin d’Armide, the Garden of Armida. Printed in the mid-19th-century by the French manufacturer Manufacture Jules Desfossé, its title is derived from a location in the 16th-century Italian epic poem Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso. The work was a late example of the romance, recounting the...

Dagobert Peche was one of the most influential designers working in Europe in the 1910s and 20s. In 1910, after meeting influential Austrian designer Josef Hoffmann, Peche began contributing numerous designs for textiles and wallpapers to the Wiener Werkstätte, the design workshop founded by Hoffmann and Koloman Moser in 1903. Impressed by his work, Hoffmann...

Leather hangings were a popular way to decorate walls in Europe in the 18th-century. They were often called Spanish leathers because they originated in Spain in the 17th century, but these early hangings were simply painted. As the popularity of leather hangings increased in the Netherlands and England, it became more popular to emboss the...

Though this paper dates from the 1960s, it is a reprint of an original design by Charles Rennie Mackintosh created in 1916. It was made for W.J. Bassett-Lowke, founder of a manufacture of model trains and construction sets, for the lounge hall of his house Derngate in Northampton. Mackintosh was an architect and designer known...

Floating trees with foliage like red clouds form the dominant motifs of this unusual, slightly psychedelic early twentieth-century sidewall. This excellent example of an Art Nouveau-style paper was made by Benton, Heath, & Co. of Hoboken, New Jersey. American wallpaper producers first started making papers in the Art Nouveau style in the mid-1890s, after examples...