Larger-scaled medallion papers offered an alternative to the smaller striped patterns. In addition to being applied to walls, many of these medallion wallpapers can be found on band boxes—all-purpose receptacles made in several sizes and intended to hold bonnets, ribbons, and other trinkets.

With so many different wallpapers, our range of designs is extensive you can find anything from Blue Geometrics to Grey Stripes and so much more! If you’re unsure where to start, try shopping from our top wallpaper design styles. Zechariah Mills, (1770-1851) a Hartford, Connecticut, wallpaper manufacturer and dealer, sold his own papers and those he imported from Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and Boston. Mills is credited with being the first New England wallpaper manufacturer to routinely stamp and number his papers to protect his own designs. William Morris: William Morris (1834-1896), a leading figure of the Arts and Crafts Movement, opposed the common and spiritless designs developed for mass production. Like Jones, Morris sought to reform English design of the decorative arts. But rather than devising design formulas, Morris looked to medieval craftsmanship and nature for inspiration. In 1861, he launched his first business, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. (which later became Morris & Co.) and began designing and producing textiles, furniture, tiles, and wallpaper.Influences from around the globe: One of the many wallpaper styles that took hold in America in the 1880s was based on English interpretations of Japanese motifs and design principals. Anglo-Japanese wallpapers are characterized by flattened shapes, defined outlines, a reliance on natural forms and asymmetrically composed circles, rectangles, and squares filled with Japanese or exotic motifs. Many were printed in olive and maroon, colors favored by the Aesthetic Movement, and were accented with metallic gold, which was used frequently during this period. Interest in relief decoration was demonstrated by the different methods for producing imitations of embossed and gilded leather wallcoverings, which had been popular in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of the earliest embossed wall coverings made to imitate antique embossed leather is Tynecastle, or Modeled Canvas. Developed and patented in 1874 by designer W. Scott Morton (1840-1903), it was produced by hand-pressing sized canvas into carved wooden molds and allowing it to dry. Tynecastle, like many embossed wall coverings of the period, was designed to be colored after it was adhered to the wall. Re-creating the original bright colors of the designs, rather than the faded colors taken directly from worn fragments, gave period rooms a startling but more accurate appearance. Historic New England was in the forefront of this new approach, commissioning silk-screened reproductions of wallpapers from the documented samples its collection for use in its many properties.

Reveillon employed the finest designers and engravers who were well versed in the neoclassical vocabulary of ornament derived from archaeological discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Several of Reveillon’s arabesque designs survive on the walls of New England houses, most notably in Phelps-Hathaway House in Suffield, Connecticut. Among the most elegant mid-century patterns were those that were embossed and gilded. Printed on heavy paper that could withstand the embossing process, the motifs were sparsely spaced and sometimes included stripes. This type of wallpaper was most often used in parlors. Falling out of favor: The last decades of the nineteenth century saw major changes in the use and manufacture of wallpaper. Among some decorators, wallpaper began to fall out of fashion because of the difficulty in washing it and because of the profusion of fussy patterns in somber colors popular during the late Victorian period. In their 1897 interior decorating book, The Decoration of Houses, Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr. expressed disdain for wallpaper and found little reason to recommend it to their readers. Wallpaper companies and the public did not agree. In 1890 American mills were producing one hundred million rolls of wallpaper a year and quantities continued to be imported. One company advertised that the “decorative possibilities of the new WALL PAPERs are almost boundless.”French wallpaper manufacturers also developed relatively simple techniques for producing spectacular designs. Jean Zuber experimented with ways of applying multi-colored grounds to the papers. His cousin, Michel Spoerlin, perfected a method of blending multiple ground colors, called irise, on a single roll of paper. The earliest record of wallpaper in America is in the estate inventory of a Boston stationer in 1700, where “7 quires of painted paper and three reams of painted paper” were listed. Like all early references, it is more descriptive of quantity than of design. Only one wallpaper in Historic New England’s collection with a history in New England dates to this early period; it was later used to cover a copy book of poetry in 1783.

Unsure what to pair with your feature wallpaper? We have the choice of over 400 Paint Colours or if wallpaper is more your style try our Plain and Textured In America, these were called rainbow papers. The brilliant green, pink, and yellow matte ground of this Zuber paper dating from 1825-1835 is over printed with a restrained foliate medallion pattern en grisaille.Clough is best known for the commemorative paper of George Washington he advertised less than one year after Washington’s death in 1799. Based on a variation of the pillar and arch design, “ Washington’s Monument” includes classical motifs and allegorical figures of Justice and Liberty weeping over the loss of the national hero.

Can I design desktop wallpapers? Yes, you can! You do not need to be a graphic designer for you to do this. All you need to do is to know how to save images as wallpapers, and there you go! You will have a wallpaper that suits your needs and preferences. What is the use of a desktop wallpaper? Well, adding a wallpaper to your desktop is not mandatory. In fact, you can decide to use a dark colour, and life will move on as usual. However, this element comes with a sense of beauty. They add glamor to your computer and make it look aesthetically appealing and highly presentable. Sometimes, people display their feelings through the use of desktop wallpapers. Interesting, huh? You can add an image that shows how you feel or one that means something to you. Adding a quote will act as a reminder of what inspires you in your day-to-day life. That said, desktop wallpapers cannot be ignored, they mean different things to different people. In contrast to these large monochromatic designs, a variety of colorful smaller-scaled patterns based on textile designs such as brocades and printed cottons were available. The simplest of these were called sprig patterns like this neatly composed daisy.Innovative pattern types and techniques: Another pattern type that originated in France and was extremely popular during the early nineteenth century was called a “landscape figure.” These formulaic patterns were composed of rows of two or three repeating vignettes with pastoral or classical themes separated by vertical stripes on a dotted or diapered field. To keep pace with their French competitors, American wallpaper firms produced many adaptations of this style. Made around 1810-1815, this American landscape figure paper was used in a house near Plymouth, Massachusetts; apparently, the home owner didn’t mind that the design was misprinted. Fascination with the Orient created colorful and fanciful depictions of Westerners interpretations of Chinese design known as “Chinoiserie.” Rococo Revival wallpapers feature naturalistic flowers, C-scrolls, fanciful bouquets, and delicate garlands. American wallpaper manufacturers often copied imported French designs but also created many of their own. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish a high-quality American wallpaper printed on a satin (highly polished) ground from its French counterpart. In the decade that followed the publication of Jones’s book, English theories of design would slowly become familiar to most Americans and provide an alternative to French realism.