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| Anonymous French Designer Rococo Revival ca. 1915 block-printed wallpaper Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Cheney Brothers (Manchester, Connecticut) Brocatelle 1925 printed silk and linen upholstery fabric National Museum of American History, Washington DC |
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| Anonymous French Designer Cope Hood ca. 1700 silk satin damask with metallic thread brocading Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Designer L'Ouïe ca. 1935 block-printed wallpaper Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Designer Loop-knotted Ribbons ca. 1900 block-printed wallpaper border Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Designer Rococo Revival ca. 1910 block-printed wallpaper Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Nicolas Jean-Baptiste de Poilly Rococo Ornament Design ca. 1730-40 etching and engraving Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Nicolas Jean-Baptiste de Poilly Rococo Cartouche Design ca. 1730-40 etching and engraving Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous British Designer Rococo Revival ca. 1880-90 embossed and hand-painted wallpaper Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous American Designer Rococo Revival ca. 1875 machine-printed wallpaper Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Designer Border with Griffin 18th century Valenciennes bobbin-lace of linen National Museum of American History, Washington DC |
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| Anonymous French Designer Embroidery Sample ca. 1770 silk embroidery with sequins on silk velvet Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Designer Embroidery Sample ca. 1770 silk embroidery with sequins on silk velvet Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous American Designer Rococo Revival ca. 1930-40 machine-printed wallpaper Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Designer Rococo Revival ca. 1928-29 machine-printed wallpaper Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Designer Fabric Panel ca. 1740-60 silk satin brocade with metal-wrapped threads Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous American Designer Paper Doll Costume ca. 1876-80 die-cut and hand-colored lithograph Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
21 September 1946
We went to Rochester. Saw the gulls on the brown mud, heard the boys and men singing and droning beautifully in the cathedral. Close up to me lump of the Norman pillar, so massive. it made me think for once of all the weight in the air above me – every moment pressing down, threatening century after century.
And the west front with the broken saints, thin in their Romanesque niches – black, crusted, cruelly restored in some places. It gave me the feeling of a noble slum. It had been there, I suppose, since the twelfth century, gathering all the defacements and scourings and mendings to it, until it seemed toughened to receive almost any outrage.
*
We found the Guildhall door open so we went up the fine wide staircase, gazed up at the plaster angel's fully modelled stomach in the middle of the ceiling, admired the wide panels on the walls, then came into the fine room hung with full-length portraits nearly all in early eighteenth or late seventeenth-century clothes. Only one man was in nineteenth-century tailcoat. And he seemed disregarded by all the men of Anne's reign, and Anne herself. Or perhaps it is truer to say that all the whigged people were so busy concentrating on their own consequence that his lesser sort of pomposity looked almost like the sad smiling anxiety of the snubbed.
– from The Journals of Denton Welch (who was born in 1915, gravely injured in 1935, then wrote the journals between 1942 and his early death in 1948), edited by Michael De-la-Noy (1984)



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