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Image features a wallpaper with a scrolling floral design printed to imitate a silk damask. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Rococo Influences
This floral wallpaper was produced in the early 20th century where the large-scale floral motif and scrolling stem and foliage convey the organic and sensuous nature of the art nouveau style. This paper is part of an unbound wallpaper sample book that contained a wide variety of designs in the art nouveau and Mission styles....
Image features white wallpaper with olive green scrollwork from which fern-like foliage sprouts. Monkeys, dressed in costumes of ultra-bright green, blue, red and pink, are perched on the scrollwork and involved in human activities such playing musical instruments and blowing bubbles. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Monkeying Around
Scrolling framework twists and curls along the length of this wallpaper, Singeries, which was screen printed by Piazza Prints Inc. and is dated to 1965. Winding along these curling sections are delicate green fronds that look to be from a fern or palm tree as their leaves reach outwards. Between the framework and fronds is...
Image shows multi-panel scenic wallpaper of alpine scene, in sequence left to right. a) Nine cows before two huts. Large waterfall; b) Five cows before stone-based hut; c) Ten cows crossing bridge over waterfall, large single rock above cows; d) River landscape with distant valley. Six spruce trees in foreground, with berries and blossoms in immediate foreground; e) Clearing with single tree. Two goats, f) Rocky landscape with cap-like peak on horizon. Single thin tree in upper third of panel. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Landscape Escape
Wall-hangings throughout the centuries have come in a variety of forms and materials, tapping upon subject matter that is just as diverse. During the late 1700’s and early 1800’s scenic wallpapers came into production and swept through Europe, most notably in their place of origin, France. They are thought to have been created in a...
Image features book cover of Silk Dyeing, printing and finishing by George H Hurst. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Technological Handbooks
The museum as “practical working laboratory” that sisters Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt envisioned for the study of the decorative arts, could not have been realized without the extensive collection of books and supporting materials found in the library at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Numerous books about process, such as the...
Image shows a nursery wallpaper with images from different rhymes. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Rhyming around the Nursery
Gazing at this carefully organized menagerie surrounded by creatures of all sorts and softly, scrolling vines, this wallpaper entices our eyes to flit from scene to scene. In one section, we notice a spider looming next to a small girl and in the next a mischievous cat plays a fiddle. As this continues, we slowly...
How to Keep Your Cool
In the days before under-counter wine fridges, seaux à bouteilles, buckets made of earthenware or porcelain, were filled with ice water and used to keep bottles of wine cool. Their use continues to this day in the form of metal ice buckets used to keep white wine chilled table-side at fancy restaurants. When these objects were made,...
Parade of Parachutes
LIFE magazine deemed him as a “dressmaker in silver” in 1939, but Tommi Parzinger was an incredibly versatile designer, celebrated for his furniture, wallpaper, packaging and textiles.[1] Parzinger designed furnishings for socialites, decorators, and celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and the Rockefellers and he established himself as a man about town in the glamorous circles of...
Design and the Space Age
This porcelain mug commemorates the day that the Soviet Union sent the first human into space. The mug features the date, April 12, 1961, that Yuri Gagarin’s launch took place and it depicts a rocket, embellished with gold, moving past an image of the earth. The mug was manufactured by the Dmitrov Porcelain Factory which...
Something Blue
The luminous iridescent shades of blue in this 8 ¼ inch tall vase are breathtaking. The neck’s chevron pattern resembles the “rippled” and “feathered” glass in Tiffany’s stained glass windows and famed lamps. This shade of blue is similar to the “aurene blue” created by Steuben Glass Works by 1904 and can be seen in a vase , also...