Frances Elkins was a great fan of scenic wallpapers and used them throughout her career. They were probably purchased from Nancy McClelland, who was active in Chicago and California at the time. The house appears in McClelland’s last book, Historic Wall-Papers. The wallpaper has been in the house since it was built in the 1920s.

Jardin de Bagatelle, also known as Jardin Anglais (The English Gardens), was manufactured in Paris in 1802-1803 by Joseph Dufour and attributed to the designer Pierre-Antoine Mongin. The scenery shows the fondness at the time for English gardens. The panoramic design is significant in that recent scholarship appears to date this paper before Dufour’s Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, making Jardin de Bagatelle the first scenic.

The pagoda-bridge was inspired by the Château du Comte d'Artois in Bagatelle in Paris, and the Neo-classical temple was modeled after the Trianon at Marie Antoinette’s estate in Versailles. The costumes on the figures represent the fashion of the Directoire and Consulat periods (1795-1804), reminiscent of the engravings of Parisian artist Philibert-Louis Debucourt, a leading maker of multi-plate colour prints.

Scenic Wallpaper was brought in to clean the antique paper. We then glued down areas that needed to be secured, especially along the decorative border. At some point in the paper’s history, the entire sky had been painted over in with a golden yellow/brown, possibly because the original sky had faded or worn off to the color of the background paper. We decided to restore the sky back to the original blue. We also touched up other faded and chipped paint, including restoring the faded yellow water to it’s original blue color.