This post was originally published on June 1, 2016. Charles Burchfield is one of the best known American watercolorists of the twentieth century, painting urban street scenes as well as more rural landscapes in a rather sullen fashion. It is less well known that he designed wallpaper, working for the M. H. Birge and Sons...

The Milwaukee Handicraft Project’s block printing unit developed as an off-shoot of the bookbinding unit, when the designers there decided to decorate their book covers with linoleum block prints. This quickly evolved into the creation of printed yardage. Barbara Warren was among the graduates of the Milwaukee Teacher’s College art department who served as designer/supervisor,...

The origins of this unique sample of wallpaper are unknown although it was most likely produced in France or Austria in the 1920s. Paul Frankl, prominent early modernist designer in the United States, gifted the wallpaper sample to Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt in 1930. The wallpaper is remarkable for being Cubist in style. The use...

This design of tree canopies is an unusual subject matter for a wallpaper but it makes more sense when put in context. I’m not sure where this was intended to be used but it seems appropriate for a hallway, den, or maybe a breakfast room. Just another way to bring nature, or thoughts of nature,...

Elizabeth Ann Harpin Andrew was born on September 26, 1749, and stitched this sampler at the age of six. She ornamented her work with highly stylized floral motifs, framed with four-leaf clovers in a chain-link border. Elizabeth recorded the sampler’s completion date as October 17, 1755, and carefully calculated her age on that date as...

In this fabric, designer Jean Beaumont uses a lush pattern of oversized exotic florals and foliage, interspersed with stylized animal and human figures, to call forth an idyllic scene of paradise on earth. This, however, is a fleeting paradise, as the female figure (Eve) hands the forbidden fruit to the male (Adam). This sophisticated evocation...

Charles Burchfield is one of the best known American watercolorists of the 20th century, painting urban street scenes as well as more rural landscapes in a rather sullen fashion. It is less well known that he designed wallpaper, working for the M. H. Birge and Sons company in Buffalo, New York, from 1921 until 1929,...

This is another wallpaper sample book that was recently photographed as part of the museum’s mass digitization. The book contains a compilation of three different collections: two collections designed by Jack Lenor Larsen with a total of twelve patterns, and the third collection by William Skilling with another four patterns. Larsen designed his first collection...