Enfilade

As noted in Wallpaper News, Issue #5 (September 2014), an occasional newsletter edited by Robert Kelly, Churchill House Press has recently published this book by David Skinner, with proceeds benefitting the Irish Georgian Society:

David Skinner, Wallpaper in Ireland, 1700–1900 (Churchill House Press, 2014), 216 pages, ISBN: 978-0955024672, €45 / £35.

This lavishly illustrated book is the first devoted to the subject of the manufacture and use of wallpaper in Ireland. Drawing on his extensive experience both as a maker and a researcher of historic wallpapers, David Skinner has compiled a detailed survey of the patterns used to decorate Irish houses from the early eighteenth century until the demise of the Irish ‘paper-staining’ trade at the close of the nineteenth century. Journals, letters, invoices and newspaper advertisements are among the sources explored to chart the history of wallpaper in Ireland, the role of  emigrant Irish artisans in developing wallpaper manufacture in France and North America, the tax on wallpaper, and the trade in smuggled wallpaper between Ireland and Victorian England.

The book will provide an invaluable guide to researchers, architects and those involved in the study of historic interiors. Many of the rooms illustrated are published here for the first time, and include little-known examples of the sumptuous wallpapers imported from China and France, set alongside the
products of native ‘paper-stainers’.

Robert O’Byrne provides a brief review in The Irish Times
(5 July 2014).