Beginning in the 1880s, some wallpaper manufacturers returned to producing designs that imitated more expensive fabrics, including silk and wool damasks, cut velvets, and silk moirés. The earliest record of wallpaper in America is in the estate inventory of a Boston stationer in 1700, where “7 quires of painted paper and three reams of painted paper” were listed. Like all early references, it is more descriptive of quantity than of design. Only one wallpaper in Historic New England’s collection with a history in New England dates to this early period; it was later used to cover a copy book of poetry in 1783. Zechariah Mills, (1770-1851) a Hartford, Connecticut, wallpaper manufacturer and dealer, sold his own papers and those he imported from Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and Boston. Mills is credited with being the first New England wallpaper manufacturer to routinely stamp and number his papers to protect his own designs. French wallpaper manufacturers also developed relatively simple techniques for producing spectacular designs. Jean Zuber experimented with ways of applying multi-colored grounds to the papers. His cousin, Michel Spoerlin, perfected a method of blending multiple ground colors, called irise, on a single roll of paper.

Influences from around the globe: One of the many wallpaper styles that took hold in America in the 1880s was based on English interpretations of Japanese motifs and design principals. Anglo-Japanese wallpapers are characterized by flattened shapes, defined outlines, a reliance on natural forms and asymmetrically composed circles, rectangles, and squares filled with Japanese or exotic motifs. Many were printed in olive and maroon, colors favored by the Aesthetic Movement, and were accented with metallic gold, which was used frequently during this period.Nineteenth-century designers and architects revived many earlier styles such as the Gothic, Rococo, and those from the Renaissance and Elizabethan periods.

Interest in relief decoration was demonstrated by the different methods for producing imitations of embossed and gilded leather wallcoverings, which had been popular in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of the earliest embossed wall coverings made to imitate antique embossed leather is Tynecastle, or Modeled Canvas. Developed and patented in 1874 by designer W. Scott Morton (1840-1903), it was produced by hand-pressing sized canvas into carved wooden molds and allowing it to dry. Tynecastle, like many embossed wall coverings of the period, was designed to be colored after it was adhered to the wall. Japanese Leather Paper was one of the most successful and extravagant imitations of embossed leather. Produced in Japan by skilled craftsmen, Japanese Leather Paper is composed of fine individual sheets of handmade paper pressed together and then embossed. The entire roll was gilded, and the field color was stenciled over it. A layer of lacquer was then applied as a final coat to provide protection and a luxurious sheen to the finished design. Historic New England’s wallpaper collection grew significantly in 2000 thanks to the addition of the Waterhouse Archive of Historic Wallpapers. This collection includes approximately 1,400 wallpaper samples collected by Dorothy S. Waterhouse, founder of Waterhouse Wallhangings, a company that specialized in reproducing historic wallpaper designs. Her business partner Bernard Scott donated her archive to Historic New England. Larger-scaled medallion papers offered an alternative to the smaller striped patterns. In addition to being applied to walls, many of these medallion wallpapers can be found on band boxes—all-purpose receptacles made in several sizes and intended to hold bonnets, ribbons, and other trinkets. In addition to all-over floral designs, striped floral patterns remained popular during the first half of the nineteenth century. Many of these small-scale designs feature stripes with stylized flower alternating with bands of Xs or dots and are printed in two or three colors. A pattern book of the Hartford, Connecticut, firm Janes & Bolles, in business between 1821 and 1828, contains five colorways of a striped pattern that relates to this variation used to line a pine trunk.Re-creating the original bright colors of the designs, rather than the faded colors taken directly from worn fragments, gave period rooms a startling but more accurate appearance. Historic New England was in the forefront of this new approach, commissioning silk-screened reproductions of wallpapers from the documented samples its collection for use in its many properties. Falling out of favor: The last decades of the nineteenth century saw major changes in the use and manufacture of wallpaper. Among some decorators, wallpaper began to fall out of fashion because of the difficulty in washing it and because of the profusion of fussy patterns in somber colors popular during the late Victorian period. In their 1897 interior decorating book, The Decoration of Houses, Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr. expressed disdain for wallpaper and found little reason to recommend it to their readers. Wallpaper companies and the public did not agree. In 1890 American mills were producing one hundred million rolls of wallpaper a year and quantities continued to be imported. One company advertised that the “decorative possibilities of the new WALL PAPERs are almost boundless.” A popular and fashionable practice in the 1880s was to divide the wall into three sections–dado, fill, and frieze–to be papered with different but coordinated patterns. Wallpaper firms and decorating books also recommended that consumers cover their ceilings with either plain colored papers or small repeating patterns. Many ceiling papers featured celestial motifs and used metallic gold or silver liquid mica, which produced a glimmering effect upon the ceiling.