The Victorian Era

How to Identify Victorian Wallpapers?

Article · Architecture & Design · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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Victorian wallpapers were one of the most distinctive and most influential of any period in British design history, and they were a major industry in their own right. The wallpapers of the early Victorian period were generally heavy, dark, and elaborately patterned, with a great deal of ornament, pattern, and colour. The wallpapers of the mid-Victorian period were generally more refined, more elegant, and more naturalistic. The wallpapers of the late Victorian period were generally simpler, more practical, and more aesthetic, shaped by the Aesthetic Movement, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the influence of Japanese design. The history of the wallpaper is examined in Victorian Interior Design, and the broader context is set out in Victorian Architecture and Interior Design.

The Origins of the Victorian Wallpaper

The Victorian wallpaper had its origins in the eighteenth century, when wallpaper was a luxury item, hand-printed on hand-made paper, and a sign of wealth, status, and taste. The eighteenth-century wallpaper was generally a block-printed paper, printed by hand from a carved wooden block; a flock paper, printed with a design of raised wool, silk, or other fibre; or a damask paper, printed with a design that imitated the appearance of woven damask. The early papers were generally small in scale, with delicate, two-colour patterns inspired by Chinese, Indian, and Rococo originals, and they were sold in panels to be hung in the reception rooms of the larger houses.

The nineteenth century saw the development of the machine-printed wallpaper. The first machine-printed papers were produced in the 1830s and 1840s, using steam-powered cylinder presses adapted from calico printing, and the technique was steadily refined over the following decades. Machine printing allowed wallpaper to be produced in far larger quantities and at far lower cost than hand printing, bringing patterned wall coverings within the reach of a much wider range of customers, and the wallpaper industry became one of the great Victorian industries.

The Manufacturers of the Period

The Victorian wallpaper was produced by a number of major manufacturers. The most celebrated designs of the period were those of William Morris and Morris & Co., which were block-printed for the firm by Jeffrey & Co. of Islington, itself a leading producer of art wallpapers, and they included the Trellis of 1862, the Pomegranate of 1866, the Fruit of 1865–66, the Acanthus of 1875, the Honeysuckle of 1876, and the Lodden of 1884, all of which remain in production today. Other important British manufacturers included Arthur Sanderson & Sons, founded in 1860, known for their reproduction papers; William Woollams & Co., known for their hand-blocked Gothic papers of the 1840s and 1850s; and Shand Kydd, founded in 1891, known for their art nouveau and Aesthetic designs.

The British wallpaper market was also supplied by foreign manufacturers, most notably the French. Zuber & Cie, of Rixheim in Alsace, was famous for its panoramic scenic papers, the most famous being the Vues de l’Amérique du Nord of 1832 and the Vues de Suisse of 1839, and Desfossé & Karth, of Paris, produced luxurious papers for the export trade. French papers were prized for the refinement of their printing and colouring, and they were widely imitated by the British manufacturers.

The Patterns of the Period

The patterns of the Victorian wallpaper were many and varied, and they followed the changing taste of the period. The patterns of the early Victorian period were generally heavy, dark, and elaborately patterned, often inspired by historical styles: the Gothic, the Renaissance, the Rococo, and the chinoiserie. They were generally sold in pattern books and sample books, and the larger houses would commission their own designs, hand-blocked in colours chosen to match the curtains, the carpet, and the furniture.

The patterns of the mid-Victorian period were generally more refined and more naturalistic, often inspired by the natural world: the floral, the foliage, the bird, the landscape, and the picturesque subject. Many were designed by the great designers of the period, including William Morris, Owen Jones, Christopher Dresser, Walter Crane, and Lewis Foreman Day. Jones’s pattern book, Examples of Chinese Ornament (1867), and his theoretical work, The Grammar of Ornament (1856), set out the principles on which much of the mid-Victorian design reform was based.

The patterns of the late Victorian period were generally simpler, more practical, and more aesthetic, often inspired by the Aesthetic Movement, the Arts and Crafts Movement, Japonisme, and, in the final years of the century, the emerging Art Nouveau. Flat colour, large-scale pattern, asymmetrical design, and the deliberate quotation of Japanese models — the iris, the peony, the crane, the bamboo, the wading bird — were the typical features of the late Victorian paper.

The Materials of the Wallpaper

The materials of the Victorian wallpaper were comparatively simple. The paper of the early period was generally made by hand from rags, while the later period saw the introduction of cheaper machine-made papers using wood pulp and esparto grass. The finishes included flocked, embossed, glazed, and metallic papers, and the most expensive papers continued to be hand-blocked throughout the period. The inks and pigments were generally water- or oil-based, coloured with natural or mineral pigments, and the dyes were at first natural dyes — madder, indigo, weld, logwood, fustic, and cochineal — but the invention of the first aniline dye by William Henry Perkin in 1856 introduced a new range of brilliant synthetic colours, which transformed wallpaper and textile printing in the second half of the century.

One notorious pigment of the period was Scheele’s green, an arsenic-based colour widely used in mid-Victorian wallpapers and in artificial leaves, decorative papers, and balloon pigments. Public concern about arsenic poisoning in the home, the subject of several Parliamentary enquiries in the 1850s and 1860s, led to the gradual abandonment of the pigment, and the modern palette of safe, non-toxic pigments is its direct descendant. The colour schemes of the period are examined in What defines a Victorian color palette?.

Identifying Victorian Wallpapers

Several small details are useful in identifying a Victorian wallpaper. The first is the size of the pattern repeat: the early Victorian papers generally have small repeats, often of only a few inches, while the mid-Victorian papers have larger repeats, often of a foot or more, and the late Victorian papers have very large repeats, often of two or three feet, in the Aesthetic and Art Nouveau manner. The second is the colour: the early Victorian papers are generally in deep, saturated colours, often set on a dark ground; the mid-Victorian papers in more refined, more naturalistic colours, often on a lighter ground; and the late Victorian papers in flat, simplified, often pale colours, in the Aesthetic taste. The third is the printing: the early Victorian papers are generally block-printed, with the slight irregularities that this implies; the mid-Victorian papers are often machine-printed by cylinder, with the corresponding regularity; and the late Victorian papers are often stencilled or hand-printed, in the new, more flexible workshop manner.

The reception room in which the wallpaper was used, and the furniture, curtains, and carpet with which it was combined, are also useful clues. The early Victorian wallpaper was generally combined with heavy, dark, elaborately carved furniture, with deep, saturated curtains, and with patterned carpets; the mid-Victorian wallpaper with lighter, more comfortable furniture, with more refined curtains, and with figured carpets; and the late Victorian wallpaper with simpler, more honest furniture, in the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts manner, with lighter curtains, and with plain or mottled carpets. The history of the interiors of the period is examined in Victorian Interior Design.