Designers can find inspiration from varying forms of creative expression. Looking at the batik murals of the American artist and designer Lydia Bush-Brown (1887–1984), her sources seemed clear. Sketches capturing scenes from her travel in the 1920s to Syria and Italy can be found repeatedly in her work. Murals featuring Syrian villages on terraced hills,...
Walking through Central Park I enjoyed seeing all the brightly colored leaves in the trees, while the fallen leaves crunched underfoot. I thought this wallpaper with its warm colors and hints of green seemed to beautifully capture the essence of the fall day. This is a fairly stylized landscape scene which includes trees, vines, and...
Author: Janice Shapiro Hussain Aptly titled “American Splendor”, this textile captures the quintessential glory of the New England autumn landscape with its fire engine-red barns, rustic wooden fences, billowing clouds, and white church steeples nestled among the distant trees. Burnt orange foliage decorates the sunny and bright rolling pastures, signaling the crisp autumn air. The...
Most wallpapers designed with a water theme were intended for use in bathrooms, though given the early date of this Art nouveau border with its pond and water lilies it was possibly intended to partner with a similarly-styled wallpaper in a bedroom. Most wallpapers for the bathroom designed before 1910 appeared more hygienic due to...
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,...
Wrapped in a warm summer haze, a pair of birds, at the center of the composition, overlook a flowing stream surrounded by a flower filled landscape. The famed Windsor Castle idly appears in the background, surveying the quiet scene below. Hushed yellows and greys, in addition to the creamy white background, create an almost ethereal...
Sally Follansbee’s 1787 sampler is part of a group of samplers from the towns of Newbury and Newburyport, Massachusetts. These works can be identified by a number of motifs that were reused and modified from the 1750s through the early 1800s. The stylized floral band on Sally’s piece appears on samplers by several Newbury and...
In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. When describing wallpaper, Marthe Armitage, the designer of this paper, has said “Wallpaper… should be seen and not heard. It should provide a background in a home, and should not make you feel you have to look...
With the hustle and bustle of the holiday season coming to an end, and the end of the year upon us, it is always nice to have a moment of reflection and calm before jumping into the New Year. This wallpaper, aptly entitled “The Birches”, seems to echo such a sentiment with its cool color...
Arches is from the first collection of murals Ilonka Karasz designed in 1948 for Katzenbach & Warren, the New York wallpaper firm for whom she designed almost exclusively. Like the majority of her murals it was printed in the blueprint process, her favorite reproduction process for murals as it captured all the nuances of her...
This promotional brochure for the Trees mural designed by Ilonka Karasz in 1960 contains a lot of information packed in an attractive format. This is printed in the luxograph process which was the same technique used to print the full-size murals. This technique was a blueprint method introduced by Katzenbach & Warren in 1947 for...
Ragged, curvy and relentless, the pussy willow catkins in this print are symbolic of the battle for spring that marks the month of March. Designed by Theodor van Hoytema (Dutch, 1863-1917) for a 1911 calendar, one can understand the month it represents even without translating the Dutch word at the top: “Maart” or March. Known...
During the years when America was involved in World War II there was a moratorium on new wallpaper designs as the materials used to make printing rollers and silk screens were all needed for the war effort. This forced manufacturers to continue printing the same designs for years. So when the moratorium ended manufacturers got...
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...
Betsy Adams’s sampler is part of a large group of related examples worked from about 1790 until at least 1805 in Boston or nearby towns in Middlesex County. Typical characteristics of these samplers are deeply arcaded borders surrounding a central panel comprising an alphabet, verse, and pictorial elements within a saw-tooth border. The pictorial elements...
