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| One of the earlier known English Print Rooms was done by Louisa Lennox Conolly in her home, Castletown , County Kildare, Ireland. Louisa, one of the five famous Lennox sisters, was Immortalized by Stella Tillyard in the book, The Aristocrats. The most generous of women, she was unhappily childless but was devoted to her husband and village. Her energies were focused into the decoration of her home, Castletown. Always entertaining, her friends engaged in helping her cut the small bits and pieces out to create her Print Room |
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| The Origins
The
English Print Room found it's origins in Great Britain around 1750 and was popular until about 1800.
Beginning as an amateur past time, ladies would gather
together for tea and instead of picking up needlework, they would pick up their scissors and cut out paper frames and
decorative embellishments such as bows, chains and ribbons in order to
frame out and construct a Print Room. However, some ladies personal
ambitions for a Print Room were outweighed by their time or expertise in
constructing their own design at which point professional artisans such
as royal cabinetmaker, Benjamin Goodison, or famed cabinetmaker, Thomas
Chippendale would have been called in to "Put Up" a Print Room for some
of the great home of the day. Only a handful of original Print Rooms
survive today but there were many others recorded and others simply
lost over the years.
Print Rooms were popular throughout Great Britain, Europe. There were
some
possibly done in the United States as noted in an advertisement in a
Philadelphia newspaper from one, Joseph Dickinson, in 1784. No known
Print Rooms are documented today in the United States. The method
became a lost art until the 1970's when Nicola Wingate-Saul, who was
instrumental in bringing the Print Room back into fashion and practice,
created the current Revival Period.
The Selections
The room types ranged
from hallways, small dining or breakfast rooms, bedrooms, sitting rooms
or dressing rooms. Today we add Powder Rooms and Bathrooms to that list
as one of the more popular rooms.
The colors most often used was pale yellow ochre, followed by pale greens, blues, earth toned terra-cotta reds and pinks.
The prints
of the day could have ranged anywhere from portraits, cartoons of the day, English country
scenes, Italian landscapes, sea scapes, hunting scenes and even a
collection of war time scenes depicting the gentleman?s tour in the
military.
The borders were
printed by several notable engravers, the most famous of which was
Francois Vivares. His designs were fashioned from classical motifs. All
border lengths and pieces were sold on one sheet from which the artists
or ladies would sit and cut out.
The Method
The
prints were arranged so they were generally symmetrical and in balance
with each other. As the technique matured and became more
sophisticated, a variation in sizes and shapes of the frames was
desirable.
The Secret
The
secret to a Print Room then and now, is that it is personal. No two
Print Rooms are alike. Each owner, whether they did it themselves or
had an artisan do it for them, had input as to the subject, design and
mood of the room.
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