Chinese wallpaper
Category
Architecture / Features & Decoration
Date
circa 1800 - circa 1840
Materials
Watercolour on paper
Place of origin
Guangzhou
Order this imageCollection
Belton House, Lincolnshire
NT 433859
Summary
Chinese wallpaper depicting bamboo, climbing plants and birds, with human figures in the foreground, against a pink background (now mostly faded to white), painted in watercolours on paper, in the Chinese Bedroom.
Full description
The wallpaper is edged by two European paper borders (faux bamboo and latticework on a green ground), with additional faux bamboo woodwork. The figures are smaller in scale than the bamboo and the birds. Chinese numerals are visible at the bottom of the individual sheets. Some of the motifs were cut out and rearranged by the paper-hangers. The wallpaper is similar in style to the wallpapers in the State Bedroom at Penrhyn Castle (NT 1422110), the Bamboo Bedroom at Belton House (NT 434774), the Chinese Room at Ickworth (NT 856001) and the Crimson Bedroom at Nostell Priory (NT 959652) – they may all have been made by the same workshop. See Emile de Bruijn, Andrew Bush and Helen Clifford, Chinese Wallpaper in National Trust Houses, Swindon, 2014, cat. 3, pp. 15–6; Emile de Bruijn, Chinese Wallpaper in Britain and Ireland, London, Philip Wilson Publishers in collaboration with the National Trust, 2017, pp. 182–5.
Provenance
The wallpaper appears to have been hung in about 1840, for John Cust, 1st Earl Brownlow (1779-1853) and his third wife, Emma Sophia, née Edgcumbe (1792-1872). Purchased by the National Trust as part of the contents of Belton House from Edward Cust, 7th Earl Brownlow, with the help of a grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, 1984.