Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 - (Page 54)

Museum curators uncover more than 150 years of decorating styles in the interior of a New Orleans shotgun house Fragments of wallpaper provide an interesting look into popular taste in years past. The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum holds more than ten thousand examples of wallcoverings, the earliest of which dates from the 17th century. In 18th and early 19th-century America, homes of the wealthy boasted wall coverings of gilded and embossed leather, fabric or hand-painted paper, but with the advent of machine-printed wallpaper in the 1840s, even people of modest means could afford to decorate their homes with paper. The wallpaper collection of the Louisiana State Museum contains approximately 50 patterns recovered from 19th-century New Orleans buildings, as well as a wallpaper sample book that dates from the late 1920s. Although much of the paper is in relatively small fragments, enough exists to show the Twelve different wallpaper designs were found in this simple Marigny house. patterns and vibrant colors that decorated the walls of New Orleans homes. The earliest paper in the collection dates from about 1816 and depicts “Psyche Borne Away by the Zephyrs.” Artists Louis Lafitte and Méry-Joseph Blondel designed twelve scenes from the legend of Psyche and Cupid that were produced by the firm of Joseph Dufour in Paris. Printed en grisaille, in shades of black and white on an olive-brown background, this paper was said to have been installed in the French Quarter’s renowned Napoleon House. This hand-printed paper required 3,642 separate carved wooden blocks to produce and was considered the firm’s masterpiece. Based on the amount of wallpaper recovered from historic buildings in New Orleans, it has been a consistently popular way to decorate the home. Paper hangers appear in city directories as early as the 1850s, and later increased from four paper hangers in 1880 to 18 in 1895, then 34 (including interior decorators and specialized wallpaper firms) by 1915. As styles in home decoration during the later 1910s and 1920s embraced a new simplicity with the Colonial Revival movement, wallpaper lost some of its appeal. Such women’s magazines as Better Homes and Gardens or Modern Priscilla called for plain painted walls with white woodwork, telling housewives that the new look was easier to keep clean. “Modern” homes of the 1930s and 1940s emphasized the texture of plaster walls, although wallpaper could still be found, especially in kitchens and bedrooms. Much of the historic wallpaper in museum collections or pictured in books comes from wealthy homes, so when homeowner Joan Bostick called to ask if the Louisiana State Museum would like some wallpaper from an old shotgun house in the Faubourg Marigny, museum staff dashed over to the neighborhood in hopes of finding paper that was typical of more modest homes. The house was being renovated for new tenants, and the contractor had uncovered old wallpaper beneath a layer of wallboard; he recognized that it might be historically significant and notified Bostick. The house was a small three-room shotgun with an added bathroom/ laundry area in the rear. Built in 1841, the house was constructed of bargeboards taken from flatboats that had carried freight downriver. Upon reaching New Orleans and selling the cargo, boatmen would also sell their vessels to be used for lumber. In this house, the bargeboards rest vertically on the sills, and holes indicate where the boards were lashed or nailed together to make the flatboat. Wallpaper in a house such as this one served not only to decorate the walls, but also as a layer of insulation. Unfortunately, the seasonal swelling and shrinking of the boards caused the 54 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Winter 2007-08 http://lsm.crt.state.la.us/ http://lsm.crt.state.la.us/

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Katrina: Days of Terror, Months of Anguish Paintings by Rolland Golden The Historic New Orleans Collection The Great Ouachita River Flood of 1932 Jazz Notes Louisiana Architecture Louisiana: Where Land Meets Water Louisiana State Museum Through A Lens Sharply: An Interview with Michael Lewis MR-GO: A “miracle” mired in controversy Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans: An Autopsy Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

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