Exploring Chinese and Japanese Wallpapers with National Trust Curator, Emile de Bruijn
At Little Greene, our partnership with the National Trust means we can uncover beautiful wallpapers from the past and redraw them for the modern interior. Our collection includes an array of wallpapers that are inspired by designs found in historic properties cared for by the National Trust.
We spoke with Emile de Bruijn, Assistant National Curator at the National Trust, about his specialism in East Asian art. He explores the historic designs in our upcoming collection, National Trust Papers IV…
Tell us about your role at the National Trust and your work with historic wallpapers.
“I am an Assistant National Curator, which means that I help with the research, cataloguing interpretation and display of the collections across the different historic properties, in my case in the area of decorative art. I also have a background in East Asian art, Japanese and Chinese art in particular.
A few years ago, I was able to catalogue the Chinese export wallpapers in the Trust’s houses, which helped to stimulate awareness of this amazing Eastern-Western decorative art form. I now occasionally also help with the research into European wallpapers. They can be a wonderfully vivid reflection of the taste of their time.”
At Little Greene, we adapt and recolour wallpaper designs in the National Trust collections to make them suitable for the modern interior. How are you involved in this process?
“Little Greene is very good at ‘sniffing out’ wallpapers in National Trust houses that you might be able to use for inspiration. Sometimes you even turn a motif from a tiny fragment into a complete, new wallpaper! I just occasionally point you in the right direction during your searches, and provide a bit of historical context about the original wallpapers, where they sit in the history of a house or the history of design.”
Chinese- and Japanese-inspired designs such Belton Scenic and Massingberd Blossom have seen a new popularity in recent years. Can you share a bit about the history of this taste for East Asian art and design?
“It might come as a surprise, but this goes back more than 400 years. In the early 1600s, northern Europeans began to send trading ships to China and Japan, bringing back luxury goods such as porcelain, lacquer and embroidered silk. Asian objects were rapidly incorporated into British interiors.
By the late seventeenth century, lacquer was being used to decorate walls, and Chinese paintings and prints were similarly used as ‘wallpaper’. Then in the middle of the eighteenth century, Chinese artisans responded to that demand by producing purpose-made pictorial wallpaper for the European market.
It turned out to be a hugely successful global product, introducing ‘exotic’ designs into the most intimate of domestic spaces. Although the taste fluctuated a bit over time, Chinese wallpapers – and Chinese and Japanese decorative art more widely – are now firmly associated with historic houses across Europe.”
What are some of the key features of Chinese-style wallpapers that make them well-suited to both historic and contemporary interiors?
“The artists who made Chinese export wallpapers – first woodblock-printed and then fully hand-painted – were working in well-established tradition of bird-and-flower painting and landscape painting, which had been developing in China for hundreds of years. Also, in East Asia there is a long-established conviction that the artist should express the tradition rather than the individual ego.
All of that together ensured that the imagery on Chinese wallpapers was extremely confident and balanced, but also that the artists were able to vary and recombine the motifs in endless ways. So even though Europeans didn’t understand the subtler meanings of the scenes on the Chinese wallpaper, they could appreciate the skill, harmony and artistic confidence. This also made Chinese wallpapers very adaptable: they seem to ‘go’ with all sorts of different European interior styles.”
Which National Trust wallpaper in the Little Greene collections has been your favourite to help us discover and rework?
“I can’t choose, I like them all! I am fascinated by how you ‘update’ the colours to reflect today’s tastes, and how you create different colourways of the same design. The actual wallpapers have lovely textures. And it is fun to see how in some cases you stick close to the original historic designs, while in other cases you use those as a jumping off point to create something very different.
It is wonderful to see the creative process evolving in those ways, and I imagine the eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper printers and painters must have been working to develop their products in similar ways.”
And finally, what was your experience working on our upcoming wallpaper collection, National Trust Papers IV? Is there a design you particularly enjoyed rediscovering?
“I don’t really have a favourite, but it was great to see how you created a new wallpaper design [called Bamboo Floral] out of two small fragments of Chinese wallpaper in the collection at Kingston Lacy.
The fragments were cut out from larger sheets of Chinese wallpaper – we don’t know why, but because they were kept tucked away somewhere they still have their incredibly bright original colours. But some of the leaves were left white, which is a remarkable, stylised design feature that you see with some nineteenth-century Chinese wallpapers. Little Greene have used those white leaves, combined with saturated red flowers, to great effect in your version, and the leaves are beautifully positioned and composed like in the original, so it is a lovely reimagining of the design.”
Bamboo Floral from National Trust Papers IV will be available from 22nd January 2024.
