Decorative finishes

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Discover various decorative finishes used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examples of which include wallpapers, palm matting, oilcloth and linoleum flooring.

Transcript

Turning now to decorative finishes. By and large we can't talk about paint in terms of samples here, so I'll pass over it, as it involves microscopes and very small samples, but we can look at wallpapers now. This is one example of a mid-19th-century wallpaper, and it would probably have been partly hand blocked so that the papers are in very small sections, a rough printing is done with maybe the background design and then often small children were engaged to stamp on it with a block. The colours are like these little rosettes here so there'll be a stamp for the pink and stamp for the green, and they had to be aligned properly to create the pattern.

Wall paper printing cylinder

Wallpaper Printing Cylinder.1


During the 1850s that's gradually replaced by roller printing and you get towards more modern techniques, and in the end you can have maybe six or even twelve colours on one piece of wallpaper without a huge huge cost. Now by and large in a good house when it's redecorated the paper is taken right off the wall, and they strip right back and new paper put on so you have no evidence of the earliest papers, but in a cottage often the walls are made of hessian or canvas and the paper is left on, and the layers build up just, making the walls stronger and stronger, and you get a result like this here which is a complete mess but you look at the bottom of it and you find fabric materials. Here you can see a bit of maybe Calico here and then the layers one after another on top, this layer here is an 1850s paper, again a hand block paper, later on you get to early 20th century patterns as you rise up through it.

Wallpaper sections

Subdivisions in wallpaper: Illustration of dining room decorated with Lincrusta Walton.2


You'll find in the higher quality wall, you'll find different papers as you rise up, you'll have a dado up to chair height, usually a darker colour, often suggesting masonry or timber then a filler, the big part of the wall, then the top a freeze, and  here we have a twentieth century example from the very top, which is pretty typical.

Now apart from wallpapers you sometimes find other materials, like this . This is palm matting used widely not just for walls but for flooring. It's a sort of cheap material used in the middle of the 19th century. This one came from a house in Williamstown from the walls, so it's imported from Asia made up in this form.

On the floor, early on you might have a material like this which is oilcloth. Oilcloth was an invention used for furniture and other purposes, in which the fabric was impregnated with various resins and other materials to make it durable. Patterns can be printed on it. It can be used for lightweight flooring material but also for upholstery of chairs: some old chairs have a sort of flaking black fabric and that's this oilcloth material, and a heavier grade was used for flooring and indeed for the roofing of some buildings.

Linoleum Flooring

Linoleum catalogue.3


Oilcloth flooring was displaced by other materials like kamptulikon and boulinikon and especially linoleum of which this is an example here, and this is a 20th century linoleum because it's got a complicated design inlaid you can see it's formed on the back onto a canvas base, rolled in with essentially linseed oil with cork and other materials which harden up, and can take this design. An inlaid linoleum would have the design passing right into the thickness of it: otherwise first they would have a painted pattern on the face and the painted pattern would tend to wear off. You'll find linoleum often not on the whole floor but underneath the edges of cupboards and doorways and this is the sort of thing you find where it's been preserved, when everything else has been pulled out.

Image & 3D model references:

1. Printing Roller (USA); Produced by F.E. James Co.; wood, brass, felt. Gift of Myrta Mason; 1943-54-4.

2. Illustration of dining room decorated with Lincrusta Walton; Journal of Decorative Art, March 1884, p 471.

3. Marble. Plain. Jasper. Inlaid. Printed Linoleum. Michael Nairn & Co (Aust.) Pty. Ltd. c1950, p4.