Unknown Maker, French

This rich blue wallpaper once wrapped an entire room in architectural details and portrayals of people at leisure. It depicts an imagined version of the gardens of the royal palace in Paris. By the early 1800s, when the paper was designed, the monarchy had been overthrown and the palace repurposed into a space for cafés and shops frequented by people from a range of economic backgrounds.

In the 1920s, the Huards partnered with American interior decorator Nancy Vincent McClelland to ship French antiques—including wallpapers—to the US for resale. The Huards seem to have kept these three panels for themselves, sending other panels of this design to McClelland, whose archive documents their installation in several American homes.

The Jardins du Palais Royal was considered one of the supreme achievements of the French wallpaper industry between 1800 and 1865. The precedents for the nonrepetitive designs of scenic wallpapers include murals, tapestries, stage sets, imported Chinese wallpapers, and the recently invented panorama rotunda, in which patrons viewed a top-lit panoramic painting of Paris or other cities.

Subjects for scenic wallpapers were often drawn from famous literary works, accounts of battles or daring voyages to distant lands, and the popular pastimes of contemporary life. Unlike the creators of contemporaneous romantic literature, art, and drama, however, the manufacturers of scenic papers presented only idealized images of tranquility, natural beauty, and social harmony. Conspicuously absent in the Jardins du Palais Royal are any signs of the Napoleonic Wars then raging. Also missing are the crowds of prostitutes and other loiterers who frequented these palace arcades, as seen in a popular 1787 series of engravings.

Wallpaper with panoramic and mythological scenes was a specialty of French printers in the early nineteenth century. They were very expensive to produce, often requiring thousands of hand-carved blocks to print a single series. Once installed in a room, they created convincing illusions of space, transporting the viewer to idyllic landscapes or exotic corners of the earth.

This panel is made up of three separate scenes from a series of twenty that form an entire panorama depicting an imaginary palace. Seen through an elevated hedge trimmed to form a leafy arcade with urns, a walled garden contains exotic pavilions, a triumphal arch, and an obelisk.

Prior to the 1993 accident (top), the paper had come away from its backing and suffered scrapes, tears (middle), and older repairs. Water from the leak mixed with dirt on the surface to form an unsightly tideline across the bottom.

During recent treatment, conservators gently cleaned the surface with dry sponges, removed the old backing paper and fabric, and replaced old patches with paper tinted to match the surrounding blue (bottom). Although water was used to reduce tidemarks and remove folds, this wallpaper could not be "washed" after tests revealed that its inks would dissolve in water. Once cleaned, patched, and relined, the paper was flattened by drying under tension. It was then attached to silkscreen fabric and remounted onto its original wooden strainer.