frieze

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Image features a wallpaper frieze with a bucolic scene of rolling hills, while picket fences, and groves of trees. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Dining with the Poppies
This is a fun frieze, also known as a wide border, produced in America during the early years of the twentieth century. It captures a bucolic scene of rolling hills, white picket fences, and fields of red poppies. I almost expect to see horses trotting by, or cows grazing. The design has a deep perspective...
Image features a wallpaper frieze with lots of floral swags and ribbons suspending from an architectural molding. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Did Someone Say Swag?
I decided to blog about this floral swag frieze produced in the early twentieth century. The design is fairly typical for the period with large floral swags, which here alternate with ribbon swags, suspended from pendant fixtures projecting from an architectural molding. What is unusual about this paper is the width, measuring in at thirty...
Image features a wallpaper frieze with inset panel containing cherubs harvesting wheat. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
The Wheat Harvest
I came across this frieze paper and the image seemed a little unusual. The whole theme of the paper is wheat. Printed in grisaille, or shades of gray, this frieze is a trompe l’oeil design with a large inset panel as the main element. A wide architectural molding runs across the top edge, with a...
Image features a wallpaper and matching border containing grass and a landscape view. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
No Surf with this Turf
Wallpapers were rarely designed to be used alone, and fashions in wall treatments changed frequently. In the early twentieth century, wall treatments began to get simpler, consisting of a wallpaper and wide border, or frieze, and it remained popular to paper ceilings into the 1950s. This turf design is part of a matching set of...
Image features a wallpaper border with a rose bush motif. Please scroll down for to read the blog post about this wallpaper.
One Thorny Wall Treatment
This is a wallpaper frieze containing stylized rose bushes printed on a striped and swirled ground, while an upside down heart motif placed behind the bush defines the shape of the climbing roses. The motif of the rose vines is nearly symmetrical and the delicacy of the scrolling and curving vines shows the influence of...
Image features wallpaper border with stars and stripes-patterned bunting enframing the Federal Capital Building, with an eagle perched below. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Stars and Stripes for the Wall, or Window
I thought while everyone is in the Fourth of July holiday mode it is a good time to write about a patriotic wallpaper, or rather a border. Since I’ve already written in years past about the firecracker wallpaper created for the American Bicentennial, and a scene from Views of the American War of Independence showing...
To Cowslip Farm
I have long admired the wide children’s borders, also called friezes, designed and produced in the early twentieth century, prior to the Great Depression in 1929. Cooper Hewitt has a fair collection of these with the most popular being Winnie the Pooh, produced ca. 1926, coinciding with the release of the book by A.A. Milne...
Return of the Native
This frieze by the New York-based Robert Graves Co. is an excellent example of the use of Native American motifs in American design at the turn of the century. Though this was an age that saw an unprecedented suppression of native culture, Native American art itself saw an unprecedented wave of appreciation and praise, particularly...
A Surreal View of the Land
I have always been fond of landscape friezes and I sometimes wish I lived in a nice bungalow where I could actually use some of these different wall treatments to best effect. I’ve probably mentioned before that wide landscape friezes were popularized by Walter Crane when he introduced his May Tree frieze in 1896, and...