AFA Summer 2020

Summer 108 www.afamag.com | www.incollect.com WINTERTHUR PRIMER I n the first decades of the twentieth century, two American antiquers—Henry Francis du Pont in Delaware and Henry Davis Sleeper in Massachusetts—sought out historic hand- painted Chinese wallpaper and reconstructed rooms to feature it (Figs. 1, 2). Both were invoking a fashion that began in the late seventeenth century, when Chinese markets opened to Europeans and a fashion for Asian-inspired decoration took hold. 1 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tapestries and gilded leather wall hangings were supplanted by cheaper paper alternatives when consumers imported large amounts of paper paintings and prints from China. What began as the practice of collaging these prints and paintings onto walls was transformed by the 1740s when official workshops in China began producing large woodblock wallpaper prints. After 1757, when trade between the West and China was restricted to the port city of Guangzhou northwest of Hong Kong, these woodblock printed papers, likely from the Yangzi River Delta, were replaced by hand-painted papers produced by workshops at the port. Both du Pont and Sleeper’s papers date to this late-eighteenth century moment, when they were imported but never used. The fashion for Asian wallpaper continued into the nineteenth century. When Ignacio Figueroa and Ana de Torres, Marquises of Villamejor, of Guadalajara, Spain, were living in Marseilles, attending to their business interests, they purchased a wealth of product s a rriving f rom French Indochina. 2 Among their purchases was likely a set of hand-painted Chinese wallpaper panels that they installed in the Palacio de la Cotilla, when they returned home in 1860 (Fig. 3, 4). Triangulating the World by Olivia Armandroff Chinese Wallpaper in Guadalajara, Spain, and the American East Coast In order to accommodate the paper, the couple had two rooms of the palace combined to embrace the entire scheme. 3 Du Pont also transformed the architectural fabric of his Winterthur residence during a major renovation and expansion in order to install his purchase. He redesigned a space that was initially two rooms so that he could integrate the full set of twenty-one-and-a-half non-repeating wallpaper panels. While du Pont raised the ceiling height with a cove to allow for the paper’s full length, at the Palacio de la Cotilla, the existing ceiling height was too tall, so the paper was placed fifty centimeters above floor height, with a molding below, painted a chocolatey brown to match the doors and ceiling beams. The palace’s resulting Tea Room functioned as a place of entertainment, much like the rooms at Winterthur and Beauport, Henry Davis Sleeper’s home. As at Winterthur, where du Pont’s wife, Ruth, demonstrated her skill with the piano in the China Parlor, left Fig. 1: Chinese Parlor at Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Winterthur, Delaware. Courtesy of Winterthur Museum. right Fig. 2: View of China Trade Room from above. Beauport, Sleeper-McCann House, Gloucester, Mass. Courtesy of Historic New England.