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...
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...
At first glance, this design drawing for the tapestry Our Mountains by Trude Guermonprez (American, b. Germany, 1910–1976) may appear to be a simple mountain landscape. A closer look reveals that the cool blue-green peaks and valleys are actually formed by three reclining faces in profile. In the background, the face of Guermonprez’s husband John...
This beautiful monochromatic wallpaper is an excellent example of mid-nineteenth century stylistic eclecticism. The window, surrounded by fan vaults and Gothic tracery, is a typical Gothic Revival image. However, the bunches of flowers and swirling acanthus leaves that frame the Gothic interior are Rococo Revival motifs, pointing to the enormous influence of French culture on...
“The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there.” – Henry David Thoreau, “The Maine Woods” Praised by his mentor Thomas...
In 1901, Andrew Carnegie commissioned an innovative garden to complement his new home just off of Central Park. This idyllic space is now open to the public after its renovation designed by Walter Hood, principal of Hood Studio and winner of the 2009 National Design Award. Margie Ruddick, 2013 National Design Award winner, discusses how...
This charming landscape paper features various scenes of a busy yet peaceful farm. Views include harvesting and gathering wheat, a cow being milked, and a farmer plowing a field while another sows seeds. These are interspersed with scenes of ducks paddling in a brook, sheep lounging in a meadow, and horses frolicking in a pasture....
This is another landscape paper that has been given a slightly different treatment. The viewer is looking through a dense grove of trees, into a clearing of some sort, followed by more trees in the distance. The colors in the foreground are darker and more saturated, getting lighter as they recede into the distance, creating...
Landscape views have always been a popular theme on wallpaper, and with good reason. For the urban migration during the Industrial Revolution it allowed people to bring some country with them. For rooms with few windows or no view, the wallpapers provided one. The trompe l’oeil aspect of landscape papers also visually enlarged the size...
