Chinese wallpaper
Category
Architecture / Features & Decoration
Date
circa 1800 - circa 1830
Materials
Watercolours on paper
Place of origin
Guangzhou
Order this imageCollection
Penrhyn Castle, Gwynedd
NT 1422111
Summary
Chinese wallpaper depicting bamboo, peonies, climbing plants, picturesque ‘scholar’s rocks’ (gongshi), birds and insects against an off-white background, painted in watercolours on paper, in the State Dressing Room.
Full description
This wallpaper is very similar to the wallpaper in the Chinese Room at Burton Constable Hall, East Yorkshire (Burton Constable Foundation). It is also comparable in style to the wallpapers in the State Bedroom at Penrhyn (NT 1422110), the Chinese Bedroom and the Bamboo Bedroom at Belton House (NT 433859 and 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. 34, p. 38; Emile de Bruijn, Chinese Wallpaper in Britain and Ireland, London, Philip Wilson Publishers in collaboration with the National Trust, 2017, pp. 187–9.
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, 1951. By the 1980s some of the wallpaper had decayed beyond repair and was replaced with unused sections which had been kept in storage.