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| Block-printed Wallpaper (Burmese Poppy) 1896 Jeffrey & Co and Sidney Haward, England Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Machine-printed Wallpaper (Aquatic Scenes) ca. 1870 England Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Stencil-printed Wallpaper 1905 Hayward and Son, England Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
"William Morris recognised the importance of wallpaper when he advised in one of his lectures, 'Whatever you have in your rooms think first of the walls for they are that which makes your house and home, and if you do not make some sacrifices in their favour you will find your chambers have a kind of makeshift, lodging-house look about them.' Yet divergent opinions about wallpaper were apparent from the beginning. Some considered it to be attractive, clean and durable, whereas others regretted that the fashion for wallpaper had supplanted other methods of wall-decoration. This widespread and continuing ambivalence towards wallpaper can, to a large extent, be attributed to wallpaper's essentially imitative character. It is almost always designed to look like something else – tapestry, velvet, chintz, silk drapery, linen, wood, masonry, a mural. For much of its history wallpaper has appeared (at least at first sight) to be something other than merely printed paper, and as an affordable substitute for more costly materials it has never quite thrown off the taint that comes from being a cheap imitation."
"Several 19th-century novelists have employed the motif of wallpaper to characterise those who reject honesty and integrity in favour of sham and show. In Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, set in the 1840s, the handsome flashy Sergeant Troy, newly married to Bathsheba Everdene and thus in possession of Weatherbury Farm House, explicitly rejects the honesty and integrity that the unmodernised house represents. He complains: 'A rambling gloomy house this . . . I feel like new wine in an old bottle here. My notion is that sash-windows should be put in through-out, and these old wainscoted walls brightened up a bit; or the oak cleaved quite away and walls papered.' Likewise the new Mrs. Gibson, in Mrs. Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (1866), tries to impose her own values in the home of her husband, and stepdaughter Molly. Eager to pet and please her daughter Cynthia who will shortly be arriving from 'pretty, gay France' she determines that she will 'new-furnish' her bedroom, and Molly's too, though the latter objects to her much-loved familiar furnishings with their associations of a happier past being ousted by 'a little French bed, and a new paper, and a pretty carpet.' The author makes explicit Mrs. Gibson's concern for appearances above all else when she explains to Molly that her room must be re-decorated, even against her will, so that people will not say that her stepmother has slighted her but indulged her own daughter."
"Both Hardy and Gaskell articulate a commonplace view of the period, which held wallpaper in high regard. In both these instances a new wallpaper is advocated by those who are shallow and false, in-comers with no attachment to the past or to the values cherished by other morally superior characters. These literary details confirm wallpaper's long association with deception and illusion, and with the rejection of tradition and integrity. Madame de Genlis (in 1760) bemoaned the frivolous ephemeral fashion for English wallpapers which had driven the Gobelin tapestries out of style. Wallpaper itself comes to stand for a decline in values, both moral and social: 'In the old days, when people built, they built for two or three hundred years, the house was furnished with tapestries made to last as long as the building; the trees they planted were their children's heritage; they were sacred woodlands. Today forests are felled, and children left with debts, paper on their walls, and new houses that fall to pieces!' Wallpaper becomes a metaphor for dishonesty and dissembling, for the ephemeral as opposed to the secure and lasting, and for the valuing of appearance over substance."
– from curator's essay, Victoria & Albert Museum
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| Lithographed Wallpaper Sample (Masken) 1901 Koloman Moser Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Block-printed Wallpaper Dado ca. 1780-85 France Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Block-printed Wallpaper Borders ca. 1875-1906 USA Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Wallpaper Border-design (gouache on blue paper) ca. 1925-35 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Machine-printed Wallpaper ca. 1910 Alfred Peats Prize Wallpaper, England Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Machine-printed Wallpaper Ornament ca. 1895 England Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Wallpaper Design (hand-painted flowers in gouache on blue paper) ca. 1800-1900 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Wallpaper Design (hand-painted birds in gouache) ca. 1800-1900 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Chromolithographic Wallpaper Frieze (Kindergarten Cut-outs) 1906 USA Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Embossed Wallpaper (hand-painted imitation leather) 1920 Peter Lacroix, Belgium Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Wallpaper Design (block-printed cut-outs of birds in applique) ca. 1755-65 France Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Block-printed Wallpaper ca. 1785 Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, France Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |