Scenic Wallpaper was contacted to repair and restore a First Edition of Scenes Chinois, a rare hand-blocked panoramic wallpaper c. 1820 and hand-blocked in France.

The paper was installed in an East River Manhattan dining room in the late 1980s or early 1990s. This is a first edition and consists of 30 unique panels, each 21" wide. Interestingly, for such a large panoramic, the manufacturer is still unknown.

This paper was made using wood blocks. Each block represents a color and a part of the pattern. Thousands of wood blocks were used to make this particular paper as the detail is incredibly fine in the faces and the architecture of the houses, buildings, roofs, horses, and costumes of the figures. The name Scenes Chinois was found in period handwriting on the back of one panel in Europe. After much research, we have concluded that this manufacturer made other fantastic panoramics, including Pasage des Detroits, which has a similar procession theme and the same trees and backdrop of mountains, and Procession Chinois, which mirrors this paper but in grissaille.

After a large fire on an upper floor of the building, this extremely rare first edition of Scenes Chinois was extensively water damaged. Water had flooded the room. Thankfully, the majority of the room was intact; however, some sections in the corners of the room had to be removed as the plaster behind the paper had become unstable and impossible to repair without the removal of the scenic paper. The panels in these areas were heavily damaged and difficult to remove, needing quite a lot of restoration work.

After the removal, the walls were repaired, and we undertook to reinstall those sections after first installing muslin and liner paper on the new plaster walls. Then the team restored the rest of the room, which had suffered water leak damage on the surface of the paper. This restoration was very detailed and involved doing work on every panel and especially the sky in many areas as this sustained the most damage. Some areas of the sky were damaged beyond repair, and we installed new sky that was then in-painted to match the existing panels.

Scenes Chinois was made in full color and this is the most complete sets that exists in one location. There are sections of the paper that do not appear in the Catalogue Raissoné of Panoramic Wallpapers.

This paper is also in private collections in Brittany, France and in Sweden. Including the scenes we restored, we know of only four of these in the world. It is pictured in two other rare books on antique wallpaper that we have in our extensive library. We suspect that this paper was never produced past 1830 and that only first editions exist.

See more of our Antique Wallpaper restorations here.

Scenes Chinois, c. 1820

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