This epic project changed my life. I learnt so many new skills, I made great friends and best of all it started to dawn on me quite how ambitious and exciting wallpaper can be as a medium.
On a team of three, with the über-talented Alasdair Peebles and Nicky Pasterfield, we recreated this early 19th century Chinese wallpaper from scratch in Sir John Soane’s country house in Ealing, Pitzhanger Manor. The house was undergoing a massive restoration and in 2019 it opened to the public. It’s a jaw-dropping house if anyone’s interested in visiting! John Soane really knew how to bring a sense of theatre to a building. The restoration was painstaking and thoughtful and it looks amazing now, and just as it would have been in Soane’s time.
Our task was to recreate, by hand, the Chinese wallpaper which had hung in the drawing room on the first floor. It’s a HUGE room! The only evidence we had of the original wallpaper was a tiny surviving segment which had been found behind a skirting board, and a pair of watercolours which were made of the room in 1832 by Soane’s assistant. Chinese wallpapers were fashionable in Western interiors from the middle of the 18th Century and there are several surviving examples in National Trust houses around the UK. Alasdair Peebles began an in depth period of research visiting these papers, at Penrhyn Castle in Wales, Rose Castle in Carlisle, Weston Park in Shropshire and Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire. The papers were painted by Chinese artisans specifically for the Western market and, although they are hand-painted, there are motifs which appear repeatedly in the preserved examples. Using these clues, the watercolour documentation and the tiny surviving scrap, Alasdair developed a decorative scheme which was as close as possible to the original wallpaper. Of course we will never know exactly how the original looked - I find this fact really tantalising!
We started work on the Chinese wallpaper in Autumn 2017 and it took six long months to complete. It was hard work! The scheme was so incredibly intricate and dense and there was NO REPEAT!! Every square metre took hours and hours, and had to be built up in careful stages. There are thousands and thousands of leaves in the wallpaper which Nicky and I painted. The Chinoiserie process of painting leaves is very particular, and it gives a lovely smooth, 3D effect. First you paint two coats of a base coat. If you look closely you’ll see that only two different shades of green are used throughout the whole scheme. This was revelatory to me and I’ve used this idea in my work ever since. When the base coat has dried, you paint the shadow on the edge and down the middle. This bit is very tricky because the paint has to be intensely pigmented but also very wet. Then the vein is painted with a very fine brush. Voila! Then move onto the next leaf, and the next…
There are a huge variety of birds in the paper. The Chinese artisans did not worry too much about boring authenticity with the birds and the plants. The focus is on creating a spectacular feast for the eyes. So sometimes a bird seems to be a fusion of more than one species, and that’s fine! It’s all part of the fantastical appeal of the painting. Alasdair Peebles, an absolute master craftsman, painted all the birds and it was mesmerising to watch.
We worked through a very cold winter on this project. Do you remember the Beast from the East which came to our shores late winter of 2018? This was when all the windows in the drawing room were removed... So we were very, very cold. But the grounds of Pitzhanger Manor looked incredibly beautiful when the snow fell. Leaving the site at dusk after a really good day’s work, trudging through the snow with my lovely colleagues, ranks as one of my favourite memories of all time!
This project was such an intense learning curve that it took a while for my brain to organise everything my eyes had seen, and I had to let it rest for a while. Then, in 2020, I began to develop a whole range of decorative surface patterns which, I later realised, draw directly on my time painting Soane’s Chinese wallpaper. I found that if I abandoned the incredible density of the original Chinoiserie designs, and created emptier, more spacious schemes, I could take the skills I had learnt and develop a new, contemporary aesthetic which carries with it some of the richness of those sumptuous Chinoiserie influences, but is more calming to the eye.