Chinese wallpaper
Category
Architecture / Features & Decoration
Date
circa 1790 - circa 1830
Materials
Watercolours on paper
Place of origin
Guangzhou
Order this imageCollection
Penrhyn Castle, Gwynedd
NT 1422112
Summary
Chinese wallpaper depicting a canal or pond with a carved stone edging in the foreground and decorative ‘scholar’s rocks’ (gongshi), flowering trees and plants, and birds and butterflies beyond, against a blue background, painted in watercolours on paper, in the Lower India Room.
Full description
Certain motifs and compositional elements in this wallpaper also occur in the Chinese wallpapers at Oud Amelisweerd, near Utrecht, The Netherlands (Museum Oud Amelisweerd), Winfield House, Regent’s Park, London (American ambassador’s residence; formerly at Townley Hall, Co. Louth, Ireland), Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire (Duke of Bedford), Wrest Park, Bedfordshire (English Heritage), and they were probably all made by the same workshop. See Emile de Bruijn, Andrew Bush and Helen Clifford, Chinese Wallpaper in National Trust Houses, Swindon, 2014, cat. 35, p. 38; Emile de Bruijn, Chinese Wallpaper in Britain and Ireland, London, Philip Wilson Publishers in collaboration with the National Trust, 2017, pp. 164–7.
Provenance
Originally hung following the completion of Penrhyn Castle in the early 1830s. Accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax, as part of Penrhyn Castle, and allocated to the National Trust in 1951. Full conservation treatment, including relining, was carried out by Sandiford and Mapes at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1993.