French Tropical Panoramas in America
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2019-08-11T11:05:27-07:00
Returning to Carrington’s wallpapers, the expansive French “papier peint panoramique” of the first half of the 19th century was an entirely new decorating trend.[10] These vast “scenic papers” were mass-produced on printing presses in up to 32 vertical strips per set. They were intended as documentary compositions of select historic or mythical places, such as the Bosporus, Calypso’s Isle, Egypt, Arcadia, and the Pacific Ocean, and presented in a series of distinct human scenes overlaid on one unifying tropical backdrop that could be easily cut to fit the architectural details of different rooms. This backdrop tends to look very similar among the different sets of papers. Two manufactories dominated, Joseph Dufour and Zuber & Cie, but many other French firms made contributions, including Velay.
Joseph Dufour, manufacturer of the Telemachus papers (1818), also imaginatively produced a set on the contemporary Pacific (1805). This “Les Sauvage de la Mer Pacific” was the earliest panorama sold.While such papers were often shunned as gauche in Europe, hundreds sold in the United States. By the 1820s Americans were Dufour’s best panorama customers, with forty dealers in New York, thirteen in Philadelphia, eleven in Boston, and on down the coastline, including even five in New Orleans.[11] Dufour’s prices could be as low as 50 francs for a set of papers (several hundred US dollars today).[12] The reason for Dufour’s success in America hinged on linking scenes of historic adventure with exotic landscapes, such as Captain Cook in the Pacific, Napoleon in Egypt, Telemachus on the Isle of Caplyso—tales of possession and colonial undertaking. The topics knew no bounds. They covered all of history from antiquity to the Renaissance and spanned the world from Egypt to Tahiti. “Celebrating itself as the age that was the heir to all ages,” says one wallpaper curator, 19th-century America “gloried in the power bestowed upon it by scholarship, exploration, and publication to pick and choose” from the entire globe.[13]
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[10] Using painted cloth or paper on walls had long been fashionable in both Europe and America, and hand-painted Chinese papers had been hung since the 17th century. Precedents exist for landscape scenes on walls. In the second half of the 18th century, English paper-stainers marketed framed scenes of the Greek and Roman ruins and other classical or pastoral scene. Chinese hand-painted papers also circulated in the Atlantic throughout the 18th century, alongside English papers of East Indian patterns. While the Empress of China, the first US ship to sail to the Pacific, was readying to sail in 1784, George Washington, fresh from battle against the English, had the presence of mind to put in an order for “India paper.” See Lynn pp. 101-106.
[11] Lynn, Wallpaper in America: From the Seventeenth Century to World War I, New York: Cooper Hewitt Museum and W.W. Norton, 1980, pp. 204-23.
[12] Oman, Charles C., Hamilton, Jean, Wallpapers: a history and illustrated catalogue of the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum , London, 1982. For price conversion, see Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: Forgotten Conflict, University of Illinois Press, 2012, p. 4.
[13] Lynn, Wallpaper, p. 168.
