Victorian Wallpaper: Artistic Style & Methods

The oldest method in the collection is block printing. A designer drew the pattern, a block cutter carved a separate wooden block for each colour, and a printer pressed each block in turn onto paper laid on a long table, aligning it with pins or marks so that the repeat matched from sheet to sheet. A complex French scenic paper such as Zuber's Vues d'Amerique du Nord (introduced in 1834) is reported to need around 1,700 blocks and over 200 colours, which is why such papers were costly luxuries.

Cylinder printing, introduced for wallpaper in the late 1830s, replaced the flat block with engraved copper rollers, each inked with its own colour, that printed a continuous roll in one pass. The machine could produce hundreds of rolls a day. Its limits shaped the look of Victorian papers: the repeat had to fit the circumference of the roller, and the colours were often thinner and more regular than hand-blocked ones.

Many papers also offer texture and surface effect beyond flat colour. Flocking dusted powdered wool over a sticky pattern to imitate cut velvet; embossing gave relief to imitation-leather papers; and mica, bronze and metallic grounds made walls glitter by gaslight. Frederick Walton's Lincrusta, first made in 1877, and the paper-based Anaglypta of 1887 extended this taste for relief.

Design reform supplied the intellectual frame. A. W. N. Pugin's True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841) argued against pattern that imitates relief on a flat surface. Owen Jones's Grammar of Ornament (1856) reduced the lesson to propositions and plates, among them the proposition that the decorative arts should properly attend upon architecture. Christopher Dresser, Bruce Talbert and Walter Crane produced flat, geometric and Anglo-Japanese designs, and William Morris, trained in the 1860s as a pattern-maker, built wallpapers such as Trellis, Daisy and Fruit around dense, stylised, naturalistic growth with a clear structure underneath.