Wallpaper sample 50 cm.

Wallpaper sample 50 cm.

“Farstun” is a typical Hälsingland stencil wallpaper from the last half of the 19th century. The era is known in Sweden as the Karl Johan period and had a penchant for silk-imitating patterns in sober colors. But very few could afford such silk wallpapers. Most had to make do with imitations, usually in the form of stencilled patterns in glue paint on rag paper. The middle classes of the population, priests and burghers, were also unable to afford expensive silk damask, but instead turned to local painters who became masters at imitating fabric patterns using stencils and silk-like colors. Finally, farmers also embraced the fashion for silk wallpaper, but translated the wallpaper patterns into bright vernacular colors. We have found this wallpaper in several farms in the Järvsö area where the color scheme blue, gray, red is the most common and the wallpaper that most closely resembles the farmers’ traditional colors. The more subdued color schemes in the catalog, on the other hand, are more typical of the 19th century and the Karl Johan era. Stenciled wallpaper is almost always combined with a single-color breast panel up to window height, made of wood or gray rag paper. This gives the rooms a sense of calm and harmonious proportions, even if the wallpaper patterns happen to be wild and colorful.

When, in connection with the restoration of one of the attics at Wirums Säteri in Småland, we found the first flake of the wallpaper “Förmaket”, we thought we had found a real 18th century wallpaper. The diagonal checkered pattern with a small flower sprig in each square breathes very typical rococo. The flaming gray glue paint base also gives an unmistakable feeling of hand printing. Everything in our 18th century theory was right – until we found flag number two and saw that the pattern was printed on cellulose paper and not on paper made of cloth rag, as it should have been if it was genuine 18th century. The wallpaper also turned out to be made on a roll, not on glued sheets of paper, as in the 18th century. Today we know better. “Förmaket” is a wallpaper from around 1860, but of a low-key, elegant diagonal-patterned type that became popular already 100 years earlier – and is still one of the wallpaper printers’ favorite patterns. What distinguishes Gysinge’s wallpaper from other reprints is the uneven, handmade impression and the shifting ground color. Early machine printing art, one could define the wallpaper as.