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| Anonymous French Maker Neoclassical Ornaments ca. 1810-20 block-printed wallpaper frieze Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Maker Neoclassical Drapery ca. 1810-12 block-printed and flocked wallpaper Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Maker Neoclassical Temple Scene ca. 1785-90 block-printed wallpaper frieze Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Maker Neoclassical Figures 1787 block-printed wallpaper border Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Maker Neoclassical Maidens arranging Fruit ca. 1810 block-printed wallpaper dado Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Maker Neoclassical Ornaments ca. 1790 block printed wallpaper Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous American Maker Neoclassical Figures 1934 block-printed wallpaper frieze Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Louis-Gustave Taraval after Louis Bosse Stove Design in Neoclassical Style ca. 1791 hand-colored etching Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Maker Neoclassical Wheat Sheaves alternating with Leaves ca. 1800-1820 block-printed wallpaper border Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Maker Neoclassical Forms ca. 1800-1820 block-printed wallpaper border Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Maker Neoclassical Swans alternating with Lyres ca. 1800 block-printed and flocked wallpaper border Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Maker Neoclassical Elements ca. 1800-1805 block-printed wallpaper frieze Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Maker Neoclassical Elements ca. 1820-40 block-printed wallpaper frieze Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Maker Neoclassical Elements ca. 1820 block-printed and flocked wallpaper frieze Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Maker Neoclassical Imitation of Découpage ca. 1800 block-printed wallpaper Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Maker Neoclassical Elements ca. 1820 block-printed wallpaper frieze Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Ian Hamilton Finlay Classical / Neoclassical 1987 screenprint Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
20 December 1945
To one not interested in searching out objects there must have been the frightening, frustrated gloom that hangs over derelicts living and not living, there must have been it extremely in that cardboard St. Pancras Station.
I thought of this as I nosed about – and the thought of the effect of the place on John and Eric made me hurry, turn away from things rather too unfeelingly. I was hurrying and there seemed nothing there to redeem the squalor, to clutch at one for rescuing.
Then I walked down the last aisle and saw in the middle what looked at first like a not very remarkable early-to-mid-Victorian little couch – Récamier thickened and toughened and having developed turned stumpy legs instead of delicate out-sweeping Greek ones. But what really held my glance when I looked nearer was the covering of the couch, the flat loose cushion and the round tailored sausage one. They were all of tomato soup red horsehair, dirtied of course, but remembering its life of eighty, ninety, perhaps nearly a hundred years, really in wonderful condition. And what a wonderful stuff too, this never before seen red horsehair, glistening like glass threads, rich and hard and heartless, built to wear people out, not be worn out by them. The cushions made so stiffly and truly, everything about the couch showing solid worthiness, as much as any Victorian piece I had seen; and its ugly, Gothic, sharp parrot smartness simply calling out to be used, sat upon and loved.
– 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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