Traces of China 03: The timeless allure of Chinese wallpaper

Tradition, trade and culture have connected Europe and China for hundreds of years. In the 18th century, a small number of products escaped from China and lit a touch paper in the west of excitement. In this special series, we'll uncover the intertwined social and cultural histories of Europe and China from the ancient Silk Road to the modern era. Art is traveling as a silent ambassador to spread the word about culture and civilization. It's amazingly impressive because they were such incredibly talented artists. When you talk about silk, with a value of three or four garments, you could buy a palace. We'll be seeking out the European spaces where traces of China lie hidden in plain sight. This is the Chinese room and it's definitely one of my favorites within the house. Welcome to Traces of China. Temple Newsome House is a 500-year-old property in the north of England, now treasured as one of the largest publicly owned museums in the country. It's an amazing household. It has so many accolades, it's hard to choose which one to talk about. When it was built, it was the largest house in the north of England, being owned by three different monarchs. In historic properties like this across Europe, it's believed there could be thousands of rooms decorated in antique Chinese wallpapers, dating back as far as the 1700s. Some being preserved in darkness, protected from sunlight and life. So tell me about the story of this room. What's special about this? So the Chinese room, or the Blue Room as it's sometimes referred to, is absolutely astounding. The wallpaper that we've got up is a choice by one of the characters who lived in the house, Lady Hertford, and she had a very illicit relationship, or so is told, with the Prince Regent, who would go on to become George IV. And when he visits in 1806, he actually gifts her this wallpaper. Gosh, so tell me more about Lady Hertford, so she was quite a character. Yeah, incredibly strong woman. She was described as one of the most beautiful women in the world at the period. She would go and visit him, Brighton Pavilion, which is where she fell in love with the oriental rooms that he had. So this is a portrait of the very famous Lady Hertford. Wow. You can really tell that she was a real beauty of her day. When she put it up, she then decided that her taste had changed, and what she'd seen and loved in Brighton Pavilion, she didn't think fit this room. So she got a book that was incredibly popular at the time, called Audubon's Great Birds of America, and she got a pair of scissors and she cut all the favourite birds and butterflies out, and she had them pasted on the wall. So there's about 50 birds and butterflies that are stuck on as an edition. What's amazing is that this is a first edition of Audubon's book, and what she didn't know at the time is it would go on to become one of the most collectible books in the world. Oh wow. And that means that this wallpaper is probably the most expensive wallpaper on public display in the world, which is quite an accolade. Gosh. We did have a specialist who came looking at Chinese art, who told us that the spaces within the art that aren't filled are equally as important as the subject matter within that, and that's to give the piece enough room so it can breathe. So when she looked at this wallpaper and she saw all the additions that Lady Hartford had done, she said that it just made the whole room feel suffocated. A bit of a cultural clash, maybe. Absolutely, they're coming together of East and West. So what can the wallpaper tell us about the relationships between the East and the West back then? So this wallpaper really talks about the luxury of those foreign imports. These were seen as hugely luxurious, desirable items. So it would have been hugely fashionable to have wallpaper like this? Yeah, absolutely. And Lady Hartford was known as a fashionista. She definitely, once decorated, used it to have tea ceremonies and all sorts of other bits and pieces. The desire for exotic items from the East was fuelled by a European perception of China's cultural sophistication, and the aspiring upper classes couldn't get enough. Interestingly, wallpaper such as this was only produced for the growing Western demand. The Chinese themselves had no interest in such detailed wall coverings. The motifs in Chinese wallpaper were born out of a history of botanical study. The Chinese would make silk scrolls or paper scrolls, which were brought out for auspicious occasions and hung as decoration. But at some point, somebody looked at those scroll paintings and said, why don't we take this scroll, turn it on its side, put two or three next to each other, and paint one story across them? Some of the common symbols from earlier wallpapers included cranes for long life, pairs of birds for matrimonial harmony, peaches for health, and pomegranates for fertility. Of course, you know, Chinese wallpaper isn't an indigenous tradition. They didn't have this on their walls. It's a European confection. Almost every gleaming example of beautifully restored historic wallpaper in the UK and beyond owes its new life to one person. Very often we are asked to go on site to these wonderful houses and very often conclude that in order to conserve it, it needs to come off the wall. This is very exciting. This is something that's just arrived. And this is fairly, fairly typical. It's like opening a Christmas present. Where did this come from? This is from a private client. Ah, look at that. Whoa. Yeah, it's in quite a state, isn't it? Yeah. So yes, so this is the state that things often arrive to us. We get a lot of work from auction houses and antique dealers. How old would this be? Do we know? Well, this is 18th century as well. But, you know, we were talking about quality, but look at that. Amazing. Now you can see this has been patched. So this is a European section. It's not that beautiful Chinese wallpaper. If you have a look, it's really quite crude by comparison. So that's really interesting. We will start by surface cleaning it using one of these incredible conservation smoke sponges, which you can be very delicate with, but are very, very effective. And you can see you have got dirt there already. So very effective. And you can't just concentrate on one bit. You have to do the whole wall, and then the whole wall again. Otherwise you get stripes and streaks. So again, even though that's such a simple technique, it needs years of experience to work out how to use it and use it well. We will strip it off all these backings, and this will horrify you. We'll give it a wash. We have huge silk screens that we lay them on and spray water through. Every single colour gets tested to make sure that it's not going to be affected by water. And we work out the timings exactly, and then we line it onto paper as close to the original paper they would have used as possible. This is a beautiful handmade Chinese mulberry paper made from the inner bark of the mulberry tree. It's very soft. It is. And in washing it and treating it, it becomes like that again. You know, it gets its life back and its brilliance. And any retouching we do, we will do using the traditional materials. Beautiful malachite green, fantastic crimson, which rarely survives on wallpaper because it's a delicate organic colour. I mean, look at the quality of painting. This is amazing. You can see all the tiny brushstrokes. Every single... I mean, this must have taken so long. It must have done. Over the past 40 years, Alison has worked on hundreds of antique wallpapers around the world, from historic houses to royal palaces. This example from Harewood House in the UK is unique. It depicts scenes of industry, such as the rise of the porcelain trade, moving away from the more traditional images of birds and butterflies. So a lot of these images initially were used because they had meaning. Clients were giving more detailed instruction. Could I see more pots or could I see more perspective, pagodas, buildings, figures? The traditional Chinese symbolism faded from the early papers and got replaced with objectism. More is more. As demand for this Chinese style of arts and decoration grew, the late 17th century saw the birth of a movement known as chinoiserie. If the world wants to buy Chinese taste, we'll give you Chinese taste locally. Originally pioneered by a collective of French artists, chinoiserie was the term for European art that imitated the Chinese style. And just as relevant today, the term covers a broad umbrella of Chinese art and design. Why do you think it stood the test of time? I mean, it's been around for so long. Well, it hasn't really. It's cyclical. So you had the 18th century passion for all things chinoiserie. Then it sort of died down a little bit at the beginning of the 19th century. Yeah. In the early 19th century, it was the Prince Regent that made it fashionable yet again. By the end of the 19th century, less and less people were doing Chinese wallpaper. Then it has a revival in the early 20th century, and it's ubiquitous. I mean, you know, every time you open one of the interior magazines, there's another room of Chinese wallpaper. Despite Alison's best efforts, these antique papers aren't going to last forever. So who's actually making them today? Degornay is a firm of world-renowned luxury wallpaper specialists. Everything you see here is hand-painted. Increasingly here, this is also embroidered. We want your wallpaper to be visually a treat for the senses. What's the original vision behind the company? That there was a gap in the market for creating the sorts of exotic interiors that the China trade helped wealthy industrialists and landed gentry in the 18th century create in the 20th century. Traditional in the sense that it has the same weight of design as the antique patterns. More was definitely more then. People liked design everywhere. The creative team at Degornay worked closely with their clients, designing unique wallpaper installations that are then made in China, using traditional techniques such as the two-brush method. How similar is all of this to the ancient traditional Chinese wallpaper? In terms of what it's doing for the customer, identical. So we're transporting our viewer to another world in exactly the same way as those first 18th century clients wanted to transport their guests to another world. In order to validate your ability to make something, you've got to know how to perfectly copy an antique piece. But once you've learned how to copy it, and you can reproduce it, then you understand what it's, the Chinese would call it spirit resonance, but you understand what it's saying. Now for us, the red line has always been that it had to be a paint material applied to a substrate with a brush by hand. Degornay's work can be found at luxury properties across the world. Here at Beaver Castle, the team took inspiration from the historic Wellington Room, duly named after the Duke of Wellington's stay in 1850. Then with a fresh colour scheme, the design was reimagined for the celebrated installation in the castle's Howard Room. Obviously no design repeat. So we don't make rooms with design repeats. We're only ever showing you a fraction here. So this is just under a metre. How many artists would be working on each design? So typically one pattern would have a group of five artists at different skill levels, and the team would stay as a team together through the whole course of the project. It's interesting, isn't it, that people in China wouldn't see this as Chinese wallpaper? They would see it as Chinese-related imagery in a European wallpaper. If you'd asked me 30 years ago, could there be as many reinventions of the product, I would have struggled to believe it. However, now, having seen what our clients and customers have done, I think that we're a long way from the boundaries of limits yet. So our artisans, after a lifetime of pushing one material across silk or paper with a brush, are so skilled. We can't find that anymore in Europe. We've lost those people. You know, the tide rarely goes out and stays out.