The 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.
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