Following the Pattern
Sometimes the smallest things send me off in completely unexpected directions.
Searching through a box of vintage and antique Ephemera I came upon a bookmark from Clandon Park. It wasn’t particularly remarkable but the design caught my eye. Tiny birds, ribbons and garlands against a soft cream, aged background. I liked it, so took at home and as so often happens with old things, I started wondering about it.
A small Clandon Park bookmark led me to an extraordinary 18th-century French wallpaper, Jean-Baptiste Réveillon and, eventually, a new piece for my journal. A story about following old patterns and giving forgotten images a new life.
The design on my bookmark turned out to have a much bigger story.
It started at Clandon Park in Surrey, a Palladian house built in the 1730s for the Onslow family and designed by the Italian architect Giacomo Leoni. Much of its historic interior was destroyed by fire in 2015, although fragments and important elements survived and continue to be conserved.
Before the fire, one of its grand interiors was decorated with an exquisite French wallpaper, filled with flowers, garlands, urns and birds, and there was the pattern that had caught my attention on the bookmark.
The design is known as Les Deux Pigeons, and it belongs to the world of Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, the celebrated French wallpaper manufacturer whose workshop produced some of the most sophisticated papers of the late eighteenth century. My little find had become something else entirely and opened a thread leading back more than two hundred years.
Clandon Park, photograph © Philip Halling, licensed under Creative Commons via Geograph.
Finding the Original
I wanted to know more and my my searching led me to an original example of Les Deux Pigeons in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, dating from 1789 and what interested me was taking a tiny part of its history and seeing where it might go next.
A Little About Jean-Baptiste Réveillon
Jean-Baptiste Réveillon was one of the most important wallpaper manufacturers in pre-Revolutionary France. Across Paris, wallpaper had become a fashionable and fiercely competitive business. Among his greatest rivals was the firm of Arthur & Robert, founded in part by an Englishman, John Arthur, who had made Paris his home.
Réveillons Paris manufactory became known for technically sophisticated, luxurious papers, including elaborate neoclassical designs inspired by the fashionable decorative language of the period. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes him as the greatest French wallpaper manufacturer of the pre-Revolutionary period.
By the 1780s, wallpaper had become a serious decorative art. Improvements in block printing allowed makers to build designs from numerous colours and increasingly complicated patterns. Flowers, architectural details and classical ornament could transform an entire room. Réveillon was at the very top of this world.
His story also reaches far beyond wallpaper. His manufactory became connected with the extraordinary early experiments in balloon flight in France, and then, in 1789, his name became associated with the Réveillon riots during the unrest immediately preceding the French Revolution.
Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Réveillon (1725–1811)
The Things We Almost Throw Away
Back on my worktable was another survivor, a damaged old doily I found on the base of an antique sterling silver server. It wasn’t perfect and probably wasn't something many people would have thought worth keeping but I loved the delicacy of it, so I'd scanned it. I also had an antique postcard with a little bird that I'd scanned some time before, I am always collecting antique postcards with little birds. Neither precious, neither perfect, but those are often the things I find most interesting.
Damaged vintage lace doily layered over the 18th-century French Les Deux Pigeons wallpaper design by Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, part of my process of creating a new journalling printable.
I started playing with all three. Starting with fading the eighteenth-century wallpaper until it became an almost ghostly background. If you enjoy working with old images too, there are some wonderful museum collections online where you can legally download historic artwork for your own creative projects. I particularly like Smithsonian Open Access, where millions of images are available, many under a CC0 public-domain designation. The Rijksmuseum Collection is another wonderful place to explore, with most of its collection images available to download in high resolution and many marked Public Domain or CC0..
The old doily became soft circles of purple and blue. I isolated the little bird, changed its colours and played with its size. Gradually, three things that had absolutely nothing to do with one another began to belong together.
Antique postcard featuring a dove and violets, scanned to create the little bird used in my finished journalling sheet.
Something New From Something Old
The result is a new journallng sheet made from fragments of several different pasts. The flowers and decoration sit quietly in the background, but now they're simply another layer in a completely different piece.
I think that's an important distinction in the way I like to work with old imagery. I'm not particularly interested in making old things look new again. I'd rather let them become something new.
Finished journalling printable combining the antique bird, scanned doily and faded 18th-century French wallpaper, layered with old handwritten papers.
A Little Gift for You
I've made the finished journalling sheet available as a free download. You can print it at home, cut out the individual pieces and use them however you like, in a journal, collage, handmade card, scrapbook or something completely different. I'd actually love it if someone found a use for them that I'd never considered.
Because this whole story started with something I hadn't planned to find. A bookmark. Two pigeons. And a pattern that has somehow kept travelling for more than two centuries. Old things have a funny way of carrying on.