woodblock

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Image features a scene in a town: In the foreground to the left, long strips of colorful fabric hang from wooden poles. In the background to the right, people walk in front of a row of shops under a yellow sky. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Next Stop: Narumi
Though for centuries woodblock printing had been a prevalent method of inexpensively and widely disseminating religious texts in Japan, it was not until the eighteenth century that this technique blossomed to bolster the creation of pictorial compositions, more complex and richly colored than the written documents previously published. These prints, known as ukiyo-e, are both...
Alternating vibrant yellow and blue lines form staircase-like zigzags diagonally across a cream-colored textile, with horizontal black lines accenting each "stair."
Painterly Effects
Tissu simultané no. 46, a bold geometric design of blue, yellow, and black lines on a white ground, has the hallmark characteristics of Sonia Delaunay’s textiles from the 1920s: contrasting colors with abstract, geometric, or rounded patterns that are block-printed on cotton or silk fabric. In fact, she often printed the same pattern and colorway...
An Old-Fashioned View
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...
Mischievous Dogs
This wallpaper shows two sections of a frieze design by the architect and designer William Burges. Known as one of the pre-eminent practitioners of the Gothic Revival style in Britain, Burges was known for his obsession with the Middle Ages, and he frequently referred to himself as a “Goth.” Perhaps his most famous works include...
Roll of paper printed in a repeating design of flowers and foliage in the style of Pillement. Roll formed of joined sheets.
Chinoiserie Wallpaper
This colorful 18th century English wallpaper was designed in the style of Jean Pillement, the celebrated French illustrator of chinoiserie and some-time royal painter to Marie Antoinette. The repeating pattern of flowers and foliage show Asian motifs as interpreted through a Western lense. In 1755 a folio entitled “A New Book of Chinese Ornaments, Invented...