7 PAGES OF IDEAS FOR LOCKDOWN... GARDENING, FAMILY, FOOD, FASHION AND MORE...
These beautiful pieces illustrate how a collecting craze elevated papercraft to an art form
AFTER clearing the house of assorted junk, doing the garden, including painting the potting shed bench, oh, and all the ironing, there I was, explaining to herself what she might do next.
“You could try decalcomania and potichomania”, I said. “You mean découpage,” came the reply, quick as a flash.
I was outwitted. All three use paper cut-outs to decorate objects, but after finding some examples where the terms were at best muddled and at worst switched, it had taken me long enough to discover the difference between the first two.
The Victorian middle classes were suckers for manias – everything from bibliomania (books); pteridomania (ferns); Egyptomania (antiquities from there) even ridiculously widehooped dresses, which Punch magazine called “crinolinemania”.
Decalcomania is the art of decorating pottery and other objects with Victorian scraps and other colourful illustrations. The pastime originated probably in the mid-18th century, some claiming it was the idea of Simon Ravenet (1706-1764), a Paris-born engraver who moved to London in 1750 to work as assistant to the great printmaker William Hogarth.
The name “décalquer” comes from the French “papier de calque”, or tracing paper and it had become anglicised by the mid-19th century, when its popularity for decorating pottery and porcelain became a mania.
Potichomania is virtually the same thing, but intended only for hollow glass objects, with the cut-out pictures pasted on the inside. It was as tricky as trying to put a ship in a bottle. The process involved pasting the front of the scrap or other image to be viewed with adhesive (with decalcomania, the back is pasted). Then, using a long pair of tweezers or other probe, the images were coaxed inside the object being decorated and stuck into place.
Once the illustrations were applied, a mixture of liquid chalk or calcium, dyed to the colour desired, was poured into the object and swirled around so it covered the backs of the pictures and any glass left clear.
On a wide-necked vessel, this was straightforward enough. The challenge came when attempting the same thing through an opening the size of a new five pence piece.
All sorts of vases and other containers can be found that have been treated in such a way, but blown glass rolling pins are the most common today. Given the tiny size of the opening at the end where the object was cut from the maker’s blow tube, decorating them must have been taxing.
Charles Dickens knew all about potichomania. As editor of the weekly journal “Household Words”, an edition in 1855 contains a lengthy essay on the subject. While not necessarily penned by him, the piece would have had to pass his stringent editorial controls.
The essay is not always kind, describing it as a “jar frenzy”. “A mania is almost as bad a phobia,” it reads . ... “it seems that potichomania is a method of imitating in decorated glass, Japanese or any other specimens of ware or porcelain”... but “from the nature of the process, some of these varieties of ware are wholly unfitted to be imitated on glass.”
Découpage actually, predates the Victorian era by a long way. The Chinese were using paper cut-outs to decorate lanterns and boxes in the 12th century. By the 17th century, imports from there and elsewhere in the Far East saw the fashion spread throughout Europe, where notably the Italians mastered techniques and made the practice their own.
The hobby was all the rage in Italy in the 18th century, and particularly popular in Venice, where it was called lacca contrafatta. Also known as lacca povera or arte povera, decoupage was used to decorate wooden objects with such images as scenes cut from prints, some produced specially for the purpose and then varnished.
The relative ease of the process attracted a number of dilettantes as well as professionals, and chances are, the fashion was admired by travellers making the Grand Tour (another “hobby” for rich Georgians and Victorians with time and money to spare) and practised on their return to England.
One of the best known “decoupers” was artist and botanist Mary Delaney (1700-1788). She began creating fabulously detailed and botanically correct cut-out paper collages of plants in her 70s and became a favourite of George III and Queen Charlotte. Tradition has it that she noticed how a particular piece of red paper matched the colour of geranium flowers, prompting her to cut out the shapes of the petals to imitate a bloom.
The result was so convincing that it fooled her companion, the Duchess of Portland, and soon she began making the flowers for her friends.
Despite her advancing years and with failing eyesight, she created around 1,000 of these charming miniature masterpieces, which she called “paper mosaicks” (sic).
The collection is in the British Museum.