This entry was posted on June 16, 2017 at 12:16 and is filed under Chinese export wares, Chinoiserie, Ightham Mote, Kent, Uncategorized, Uppark, Wallpaper, West Sussex.	You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Fascinating research…look forward to reading and learning more.
Thanks very much. I will be featuring more previews on this blog in the run-up to the publication of the book.
Do we know much about the artists who created the blocks or make the prints? No doubt there were other impressions that have not survived.
There was clearly a workshop somewhere bashing out copies of the pheasants and the ribbon-tailed bird, like Durer’s rhinoceros or Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness.
Are they just unknown artisans? Or can we identify name and locations where they worked? Are there similarities that allow us to bring together bodies of work and attach a Notname? The Master of the Pair of Pheasants, or the Master of the Robbon-Tailed Bird, perhaps?
Andrew, no at the moment we don’t know who designed and produced these Chinese wallpapers and prints. Most of the evidence we have comes from the examples surviving in European historic houses.
Sometimes groups of wallpapers sheets or prints in different houses have certain sheets or designs in common, enabling us not only to get a better idea of the full sets and series, but also to get a glimpse of how they were disseminated across Europe. And then if some of the groups have an approximate date (such as the 1752 date of installation at Felbrigg) then that helps to date that particular type or style.
In that way we can gradually build up a better picture of how these wallpapers developed and also how the taste for them developed in Europe. These questions are discussed in the forthcoming book.
For instance, the specific set of wallpapers shown above, by ‘the master of the pair of pheasants’, as you call that workshop, have survived not only at Felbrigg and Ightham but also at Woburn Abbey, at the château du Fayel and at Schloss Wörlitz (arriving at Wörlitz in about 1772, but already being used at Felbrigg in 1752).
The Chinese city of Suzhou had a highly developed printing sector in the early eighteenth century, so some or all of these prints and printed wallpapers may have come from there originally. But there were other centres of printing too, and equally we are not sure why it appears that printed export wallpapers ceased to be produced after the 1750s – whether it was an economic or political change in China, or whether European demand switched to painted wallpapers, or some other reason. Plenty of angles to be explored!
It makes sense that part of the patterns in these wall papers use wood block prints – I used to wonder how they could reproduce so precisely identical clumps of vegetation if they were painting freehand – I love the mystery and the exoticism of these fragile and delicate paintings.
Indeed those clumps are interesting. They seem to have created them with a special dabbing tool.
I am not sure exactly what tool they used, but it must have been something that allowed them to dab on a group of those semi-circular marks in one go, and then to do that repeatedly to create ‘clumps’ of grass or groundcover. Sometimes it was used to represent certain types of tree foliage as well. It would be interesting to find out if that tool or that technique is still used.