Chinese Wallpaper in Britain and Ireland [antikvár]

Introduction A GLOBAL PRODUCT Chinese pictorial wallpapers were made for the European market, but their appearance reflects Chinese styles and subjects. This wallpaper at Chatsworth, Derbyshire, is based on the age-old tradition of bi'rd-and-flower painting There is something timeless about Chinese wallpapers. These pictorial wallcoverings made in China for the western market show a world that is both intricate and harmonious. The scenery of birds and flowers, gardens and landscapes is endlessly varied and yet complete unto itself Chinese wallpapers share a common visual language, even if they were created decades or centuries apart, radiating a stylistic confidence that makes them appealing even for western viewers who know little about China. The fluent and detailed depictions of individual animals, plants, people and buildings create a believable world. At the same time these representations of China are so exquisite that they seem set apart from time and place, impossibly charming and alluringly distant. Chinese wallpapers depict a realm of the imagination, a China of the mind. It is probably this otherworldly quality that has allowed Chinese wallpapers to remain popular from the eighteenth century to the present day, taking on the role of exotic counterpoint to successive western decorative styles. They were visually strong enough to survive in the dominant decorative framework of the baroque, their elegance chimed with the light-hearted spirit of the rococo, their pictorial consistency made them adaptable to the purity of neoclassicism and their bold colours and patterns allowed them to hold their own in nineteenth-century interiors. Chinese wallpapers were used again in the twentieth century, in European and American interiors that were either influenced by art deco and other forms of modernism or were self-consciously historicist. The fact that they could be both 'antique' and 'modern' illustrates how Chinese wallpapers had become part of the canon of western decoration, almost transcending history and geography. And yet this appearance of timelessness is ultimately an illusion.