In Providence, French Wallpaper Delectable Enough to Eat

The Rhode Island School of Design displays its antique French wallpaper collection in a superb new show.

T he Art of French Wallpaper Design is the luscious new exhibition at the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Using its collection of French wallpaper made from the 1770s to the 1840s, likely the finest outside France, the RISD museum again shows us what a uniquely smart and inventive place it is. In one big, beautifully arranged gallery we visit opulent landscapes, real and imagined, fantasy architecture, and dynamic patterns and borders. Is wallpaper out of style? I hope not, but if it is, the RISD show will be a revelation.

RISD specializes in teaching art and design, so it makes sense for its museum to mount this show, but even more so given its collection of around 500 rare antique wallpapers that the museum bought in 1934 from the French artist and dealer Charles Huard (1874–1965) and his wife, Frances Wilson Huard (1885–1969), an American writer. Advised by the dynamo American interior decorator Nancy McClelland (1877–1959), a wallpaper expert, the Huards assembled a definitive collection, drawing from old Paris houses, many ratty but formerly, in better days, owned by people of means with taste. McClelland was an advocate for fine wallpaper in the stately homes she decorated. She reproduced many of the Huards’ papers for the American market.

During the First World War, the Germans sacked the Huards’ home not far from Paris. In the early 1930s, with Europe coming to a boil again, they sought a home for their collection in America, where it would be safe. RISD was the perfect choice.

The exhibition begins with three large Pompeiian-influenced panels from 1780 made by Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, packed with draped figures, swans, urns, swags, and foliage in shades of white set against a pretty rococo-blue background. The palette is limited, but they’re still a technical wonder. Nearby is a border depicting a scene from The Adventures of Don Quixote, from 1830, and a panel view of Venice from 1840. Together they tell us how far the art of French wallpaper came in so short a time. Colors are rich and blended to suggest paintings. All three would have transformed a home from a mere domestic space to a palace of erudition and elegance. They set a stage for fine living. It’s not only color. More muted wallpapers depicting, say, The Judgment of Paris, from 1814, is such a beacon light of gravity and good storytelling that viewers want to crack open The Iliad.

French wallpaper isn’t necessarily rare. Zuber, which opened in 1797, still makes exquisite wallpaper, using wood blocks that are many decades old or that reach back to Napoleon’s times. They make luxury goods, so dozens of chromatically refined and complex blocks are needed to print Scenes of North America, Eldorado, and its range of Chinoiserie patterns. Years ago, I considered a Zuber Chinoiserie wallpaper for my tiny dining room until I learned of the $34,000 price tag. So at least one of the top French makers is still in business.

Antique wallpaper is rare, though, because it’s ephemeral and often trashed as tastes change. The scraper is its worst enemy. Museums tended not to collect high-end French wallpaper, in part because the panoramic panels, such as Dufour’s Savages of the Pacific Ocean, can be more than 30 feet wide, in part because of a failure of vision. Wallpaper was just too ephemeral to be collected and more like material culture. These wallpapers, though, are early triumphs in color printing and in a class with master etchings, engravings, and lithographs.

The RISD museum is for teaching, so it gets serious about how these wallpapers were made. They usually started with detailed drawings and watercolors, with a selection on view. These are rare since they were often destroyed during the manufacturing process. Printed experiments are annotated in pencil. At the beginning of the show are four old woodblocks with designs carved into a hardwood veneer over a softer wooden block. The wood had to be strong enough to withstand hundreds of trips through the printing press. This technology stayed more or less constant over decades, replaced only in the 1840s by roller printing. These woodblocks are rare. Most of them were used for firewood during calamities like the Franco-Prussian War and World War I.

The museum put together an instructive ten-minute video that walks visitors through the process of making wallpaper in the years covered by the exhibition. Homeowners often mixed and matched fragments of wallpapers to get the look they wanted, combining figures of one pattern with borders from another. Early colors tended to be transparent like watercolor. Later, technology allowed lush, saturated color and lots of different colors. Another video takes us to the Sharon Springs atelier of Adelphi Paper Hangings, one of a handful of wallpaper makers using woodblocks. It’s fascinating and gratifying to see an old craft still living. The two videos, taken together, show us how the old wallpapers in the exhibition were made.

Wallpaper followed trends in style and design in furniture. Arabesques, Greek architectural elements, Pompeiian Revival, friezes, cupids, tassels, flowers, and birds come and go, some periods more florid than others. Classical figures abound during Jacobin and imperial phases. Some, like a diamond and volute pattern from 1810, flirt with optical illusion. This looks Jazz Age modern. A stripes-and-tassels wallpaper from 1840 has a minimalist look. Some wallpapers were polished so they gleam. An 1800 paper meant for the base of a wall is flocked, or applied with dyed, chopped wool bits to look like velvet. Some papers are narrow borders. Another, a grisaille wallpaper, is seven feet tall.

The exhibition is a feast of design and color. Many of the papers are fragments removed from old walls by the Huards, not easy since they were pasted, and reinstalled on lining paper and then canvas. As a practical matter, homeowners either scraped wallpaper as tastes and styles changed or pasted new over old. Our house in Vermont, built in 1915, had half a dozen layers of wallpaper in some rooms.

The small fragments in the exhibition have a ghostly presence, remnants as they are of lives long gone. I loved this touch of pathos. Some preferred only borders. In our house, we’ve had wallpaper borders simply because the tops and bottoms of walls are the only surfaces without framed art.

The catalogue is online and accessed via the RISD museum’s exhibition section on its website. All curators and authors want a printed book, and I don’t blame them, but, alas, RISD is a school, money’s tight, and an online book is vastly more accessible. Still, the catalogue’s informative, thorough, and succinct, and the images are sumptuous. It’s too bad not to do it right, especially since this is a landmark project.

There’s a chapter on the Huards, an essay on wallpaper preservation by conservator Brianna Turner, and an essay on wallpaper in the context of prints by master engraver and wallpaper maker Andrew Raftery, a professor at RISD. Turner’s essay is great for paper specialists who don’t know the intricacies of wallpaper repair. Blue, for example, can affect color. Walls in old buildings can warp, and with them warps the wallpaper. Raftery’s essay rehabilitates wallpaper as high-end prints, starting with chiaroscuro woodcuts in the 1500s, and treats the evolution in wallpaper paint and ink, the invention of wallpaper rolls, and color, color, color. Raftery designed and produced lush handmade wallpaper starting in 2019, one pattern for each of the four seasons. They’re gorgeous. His essay should be required reading in classes on the history of printmaking.

As part of the exhibition’s research and planning, the entire Huard collection is now online. Visitors can explore wallpaper by period, color, and pattern. If that doesn’t turn you into a wallpaper aficionado, nothing will. Kudos to Emily Banas, the decorative arts curator at RISD who did the exhibition. Her research is rich and new, and the Huard collection has never been so abundantly displayed. It’s so rare for museums to venture from the same old, same old reservation.

I don’t think I’ve written about RISD’s museum since its magisterial Gorham silver exhibition in 2019. Gorham still exists, a shadow of its former self and part of a conglomerate, but in its long prime it produced high-quality silver wares and was among Providence’s biggest manufacturers. The RISD show was the definitive look at Gorham silver as art — the sailing trophies are elaborate sculpture — but it was also RISD’s love letter to Providence. Gorham employed thousands of Rhode Islanders, so the show was art history and family history, which points to RISD’s unusual mission. The art museum serves the students, faculty, and alumni of the prestigious art school, but it’s also Providence’s — and tiny Rhode Island’s — civic museum. Yale’s art gallery and its British Art Center, the University of Michigan’s art museum in Ann Arbor, and Dartmouth’s Hood Museum are other examples of school museums with a broad public interest in their portfolios.

Threading the needle — accommodating an academic program and the general public — isn’t easy, but RISD’s museum does it well. Its secret sauce is the centrality of artists, who tend to be casual and cool, even the neurotic ones, and concern themselves mostly with how things are made. That’s an unusual and appealing access point for those who consider themselves as art appreciators and nothing more. When I was teaching, I loved having artists as students. They approached art first through materials. Art history, English, history, and most other humanities majors fast-forwarded to race, gender, class, and, today, grievance and oppression, reducing the work of art, an autonomous thing, to an illustration or, worse, a prop. RISD seems to avoid this, mostly, in its exhibitions, acquisitions, and gallery arrangements. And I was happy to see artists in the galleries. I’m a chatty fellow, and during my journey through the galleries, I met a talented jewelry maker and a wood sculptor.

RISD’s collection tops 100,000 objects from antiquities to today but with strengths in textiles, an exquisite Japanese print collection, furniture, ceramics, and American silver. Its French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings collection is first-rate, too. There are great things in every medium. The museum and the school opened the same year, so they go hand-in-hand. The museum’s a splendid place. I’ve always liked Providence, a lively, historic city.