"What Shall We Do With Our Walls?"

What to do with the walls was apparently as much a problem in 1881 as it is today. So much so that a book could be written about it and reviewed in the New York Times, even though it was basically advertising for wall paper.

An excerpt from the book which you can find in full with a few typos if you click here --

" I think there never will be a better way found for treating the walls of rooms than the old way - of which Pompeii shows us so many examples - of coloring the plaster when it is fresh, with harmonious ground tints, relieved with a painted decoration of lines, geometric or flowing patterns, - garlands of flowers, dancing nymphs and fluttering cupids, with, not seldom, complete pictures even - their subjects drawn from the mythology of the people. This decoration was extended in many cases to the ceilings, and even where they were not covered with plaster, but the beams that supported the floor and the room above were left in sight, these were also painted in a style harmonious with the walls. The floors were laid in a mosaic formed by small bits of marble arranged in patterns and pressed into a bed of mortar, and in the houses of the rich these floors were spread with rugs or skins."

The treatise goes on to discuss wallpaper as the solution for the modern New Yorker. I think the review was even more interesting than the book - with the NY Times starting out by saying:

"Since several of our leading painters have frankly stepped out of the restricted sphere of the painter into decorative arts that belong more to the housefurnishing trade than the exhibition of high art products, it is now in order for the art critic to enlist in the same cause."

Who were these leading painters glazing and marbleizing Victorian walls?

-- the molto bene wife

(image from Wikimedia commons)