Reproduction wallpapers.(Brief Article)

As John Hermanson relates in his article "Careswell, the Historic Winslow House in Marshfield, Massachusetts," in this issue (pp. 312-319), the preservation movement in this country started in New England at the turn of the twentieth century. While standards of acceptable restoration have changed considerably over the years, the Winslow House has withstood the test of time better than some of its counterparts. Even in the early twentieth century it was fairly easy to determine what had originally covered the walls of a room simply by peeling hack the layers of wallpaper until one reached the bare wall.

As early as 1905, when Kate Sanborn's book Old Time Wall Papers was published, collectors and historic house curators had become the catalyst for a number of firms to include reproductions in their wallpaper lines. However, at that time reproductions frequently were more closely affiliated with the colonial revival style than with the colonial period. Manufacturers did not always follow the scale and colors of an original paper, and, as Richard C. Nylander has written, some manufacturers even purloined motifs from antique tapestries, which never happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Like so many historic houses, the Winslow House is a restoration that is not frozen in one particular period, but represents ownership between about 1699 and 1819, during which there were a number of modifications and additions made. During the earliest years the rooms would not have been ...