 |
| French Wallpaper Dado Neoclassical Vignettes ca. 1780-85 block-printed Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York |
 |
| French Wallpaper Overdoor-panel Trophy with Antique Military Attributes ca. 1784-89 block-printed Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York |
 |
| French Wallpaper Overdoor-panel Trophy with Attributes of Bacchus ca. 1810 block-printed Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
 |
| French Wallpaper Border Vitruvian Scroll ca. 1800-1825 block-printed Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
"The invisibility and intangibility of that which moves us remained an unfathomable mystery for Thomas Browne too, who saw our world as no more than a shadow image of another one far beyond. In his thinking and writing he therefore sought to look upon earthly existence, from the things that were closest to him to the spheres of the universe, with the eye of an outsider, one might even say of the creator. His only means of achieving the sublime heights that this endeavour required was a parlous loftiness in his language. In common with other English writers of the seventeenth century, Browne wrote out of the fullness of his erudition, deploying a vast repertoire of quotations and the names of authorities who had gone before, creating complex metaphors and analogies, and constructing labyrinthine sentences that sometimes extend over one or two pages, sentences that resemble processions or a funeral cortège in their sheer ceremonial lavishness. It is true that, because of the immense weight of the impediments he is carrying, Browne's writing can be held back by the force of gravitation, but when he does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiralling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air, even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation. The greater the distance, the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest details with the utmost clarity. It is as if one were looking through a reversed opera glass and through a microscope at the same time. And yet, says Browne, all knowledge is enveloped in darkness. What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world. We study the order of things, says Browne, but we cannot grasp their innermost essence. And because it is so, it befits our philosophy to be writ small, using the shorthand and contracted forms of transient Nature, which alone are a reflection of eternity."
– W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, published in German in 1995, translated by Michael Hulse and published by New Directions in English in 1998
 |
| French Scenic Wallpaper by Jacquemart et Bénard La Chasse de Compiègne designed by Carle Vernet 1814 block-printed Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
 |
| French Wallpaper Border Neoclassical Floral Band ca. 1820 block-printed and flocked Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
 |
| French Wallpaper Border Neoclassical Repeat-pattern with Trompe-l'oeil Cornice ca. 1820 block-printed Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
 |
| French Wallpaper Border Running Rope Design ca. 1825 block-printed Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
"Much as in this continuous process of consuming and being consumed, nothing endures, in Thomas Browne's view. On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation. For the history of every individual, of every social order, indeed of the whole world, does not describe an ever-widening, more and more wonderful arc, but rather follows a course which, once the meridian is reached, leads without fail down into the dark. Knowledge of that descent into the dark, for Browne, is inseparable from his belief in the day of resurrection, when, as in a theatre, the last revolutions are ended and the actors appear once more on stage, to complete and make up the catastrophe of this great piece. As a doctor, who saw disease growing and raging in bodies, he understood mortality better than the flowering of life. To him it seems a miracle that we should last so much as a single day. There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow."
– W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, published in German in 1995, translated by Michael Hulse and published by New Directions in English in 1998
 |
| French Wallpaper Border Floral Garland ca. 1830 block-printed Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
 |
| Anonymous French Designer Sketch for a Wallpaper ca. 1820 watercolor, gouache Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York |
 |
| French Wallpaper Frieze Mouldings and Colored Bands ca. 1825-50 block-printed Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
 |
| French Wallpaper Frieze Decor Pastoral manufactured by Jules Desfossé ca. 1851-64 block-printed Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York |
 |
| French Wallpaper Repeating Bouquets ca. 1850-60 block-printed Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
 |
| French Wallpaper Corner-piece Foliate Moulding Design ca. 1890 block-printed Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
"Browne then turns to the strange vessels unearthed from the field near Walsingham. It is astounding, he says, how long these thin-walled clay urns remained intact a yard underground, while the sword and ploughshare passed above them and great buildings, palaces and cloud-high towers crumbled and collapsed. The cremated remains in the urns are examined closely: the ash, the loose teeth, some long roots of quitch, or dog's grass, wreathed about the bones, and the coin intended for the Elysian ferryman. Browne records other objects known to have been placed with the dead, whether as ornament or utensil. His catalogue includes a variety of curiosities: the circumcision knives of Joshua, the ring which belonged to the mistress of Propertius, an ape of agate, a grasshopper, three-hundred golden bees, a blue opal, silver belt buckles and clasps, combs, iron pins, brass plates and brazen nippers to pull away hair, and a brass jew's-harp that last sounded on the crossing over the black water. The most marvellous item, however, from a Roman urn preserved by Cardinal Farnese, is a drinking glass, so bright it might have been newly blown. For Browne, things of this kind, unspoiled by the passage of time, are symbols of the indestructibility of the human soul assured by scripture, which the physician, firm though he may be in his Christian faith, perhaps secretly doubts."
– W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, published in German in 1995, translated by Michael Hulse and published by New Directions in English in 1998