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Rococo wallpaper from Stockholm
Unknown1770
Nordiska Museet
Stockholm, Sweden
Rococo wallpaper made in Stockholm circa 1770. Bundles of flowers in pink, yellow, blue and green against oblique check background pattern in white on a light-blue base. The base colour is hand painted, the white pattern and flower contours printed by hand using different presses, while the flowers themselves are coloured by hand. This wallpaper is an early example in which multiple presses were used during manufacture.
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Details
- Title: Rococo wallpaper from Stockholm
- Creator: Unknown
- Date Created: 1770
- Physical Dimensions: w64 x h255 cm
- More Information: The rococo interior style offered light colours, a lot of floral patterns, interest in China and closeness to nature. It was soon reflected in textiles and wallpaper. Lace, ribbon and cornered boxes were popular, both on discreet backgrounds, as here, and in bold surface patterns. The patterns on early paper wallpaper were often produced in a combined technique, with both printed and hand-painted elements. The wallpaper is made from rag paper in sheets of approximately 50x60 cm pasted together into widths before painting and printing. The widths are then painted light blue and only once the paint has dried is the white base pattern hand-printed using a wooden block, followed by the contours of the bundles of flowers in black and burgundy. Finally, flowers and leaves were coloured by hand. Rag paper was made from textiles and refined into pulp, which was then formed into sheets one at a time in a frame. During much of the eighteenth century, there was a shortage of rags and as the production process was also time-consuming, paper was expensive and wallpaper a luxury. Paper rolls were first introduced in the 1830s, and wood-based paper was not used for wallpaper in Sweden until 1857. The joints both between sheets of paper and between the printing blocks are evident in the wallpaper – the former in thickened horizontal bands, the latter in the poor pattern matching of the stripes, most obviously horizontally in the middle of the diamond-pattern fields. Printing stripes was difficult, so they were often hand-painted until well into the nineteenth century, when the first stripe machine came into use in France. Its first use was documented in Sweden in 1862. This piece of wallpaper has never been used. It was donated to Nordiska museet by King Oskar II in 1888.
- Materials and Techniques: Distemper on glued-together sheets of rag paper
- Type: Wallpaper
- Rights: Photo: Brigit Brånvall, © Nordiska museet
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