Dimensions: de Gournay wallpapers are produced as panels in any height up to 4.3m. Total panel length is 0.60 more than the chosen design height when ordering via the straight run method and 0.30m more than your wall height when ordering via the tailored method. These wallpapers are 0.915m wide after trimming except where marked. Customisation of design elements, colourways and panel heights are fully available though subject to additional charge.

Collection: Chinoiserie

Details: While most other designs in the Chinoiserie Collection have been adjusted to better suit contemporary uses and tastes, de Gournay’s
Hampton Court brings together and reproduces without modification the surviving fragments from two of the most impressive antique scenes of this sort we have encountered and maintains the full grandeur of the originals.

Hampton Court is special for its joyously expressed finely painted views of life at the Imperial Court, in stark contrast to more widely known Industry Papers, such as de Gournay’s Coutts that depict more gritty scenes from everyday Chinese life. Amongst the many scenes in Hampton Court, figures are seen engaged in deer hunting, tiger hunting, poetry reciting, life in the harem, courtly processions and travel along the grand canal upon the Imperial barges all set in a rocky landscape of flowering peony bushes and prunus trees. de Gournay created the design by amalgamating fragmentary historical sources. One such was the paper from the Dressing Room of the suite of rooms at Belvoir Castle known there as the Chinese Rooms. The Chinese hand-painted paper still hanging in it was brought from the Far East in the 18th century by the 5th Duchess of Rutland.

This type of panoramic paper was popular in the years following the 1750’s when as well as at Belvoir, great houses such as Blicking Hall in Norfolk where Lady Proctor noted her admiration for the Industry Paper in 1764, Saltram in Devon and Harewood House redecorated by Thomas Chippendale in the 1770’s all employed it.

Individual panels from de Gournay’s historic designs are wider at 4ft (1220mm) and taller at 11ft (3350mm) than our standard Chinoiserie designs. Design heights are not adjustable to end the pattern within shorter spaces in order to maintain the historical integrity of the design meaning that if ordered as shorter panels, the pattern will be a section of the original and will run off the top of the panel.

Installation 1: Interior design by Meng Ye, Beijing
Installation 2: Eric Roth Photography