Chinoiserie

This One Is For Sans!



I have admired the elaborate painted wallpaper style known as "Chinoiserie" ever since I first saw some in a grand mansion we visited when I was growing up. There were trees and flowers and birds and butterflies strewn with elegant artistry across entire walls! But this type of wallpaper was very expensive and not currently in fashion, so it remained just a beautiful memory to me. The heyday of these wallpapers was in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and certainly only the wealthiest families could afford it. The origins are said to be the European attempts to portray the exotic flora and fauna of the Orient, versions of which arrived on porcelain and fabrics from India and China. The commonest motifs are pagodas, dragons, and elaborate Tree of Life designs, rendered with great imagination and little attention to reality. Or so it seems to those of us from the West who have never been to the East!

Perhaps it was in part that distant memory of these designs that prompted me to start painting trees and birds and flowers on the walls of my houses - in real life scale! I have included a couple of pictures from my former home where I painted the hallway with a mural of trees and birds.




These pictures were taken the day I moved out, so the house is completely empty.

This is the view from the top af those stairs.

And in my bedroom (in my former house) very much inspired by Persian illuminated manuscript miniatures, I painted trees and birds and flowers.

And below you can see the beginnings of my painting the walls of my bedroom in my new house with trees and flowers...... and the birds will follow in due time! And while this is not exactly "Chinoiserie", it is a very New England sort of version of the Tree of Life painting that is such an essential part of that "Chinoiserie" I admire so much!

Here I have included a few photos of pages I have torn from design magazines that show the type of wallpaper I am referring to. I realize it is difficult to see the details in these photos, so you will have to use your imagination!

And here is a sample of fabric printed in the elaborate Tree of Life pattern.

And another sample of wallpaper from a design magazine.

So, why am I showing you all these photos on my Dollhouse Blog you are wondering? Well, because then you will understand why I decided to paint the second best bedroom of the Lovely Old Dollhouse with a "Chinoiserie" mural - as if it were antique wallpaper! I have ALWAYS known that this room would be painted with trees and flowers and birds....... just as I have always known that it would NOT be easy to do it!

So some time last January, in the darkest time of the year, I began to paint the trees and flowers on the walls of the bedroom in the Lovely Old Dollhouse. You may recall that it looked like this when I showed you the newly painted peachy color.

This was before I had even finished the window trim or installed the lights over the mantle.

Here below, you can see the window trim and lights as well as the beginning steps of painting the murals. The tree stems are roughed in and the birds have been underpainted with white to show their position, but also so that their colors will be true when painted over the peach color.

Below you can see I have finished the glass window!

And also I have painted all the blue and white porcelain jars around the floor.

Gradually the flowers and leaves were added to the trees.

It was at about this point in the painting, that Sans! posted her blog about "The Tree of Life". Her story makes the true meaning of the Tree of Life so clear to me, in a way I had never understood before! We ARE all connected. In ways we cannot always understand. And her blog post made me realize that all this time, what I have been painting is called "The Tree of Life", in all it's varied and unique forms.... it is the Tree of Life that has been calling to me.





And even though I was not painting it in full scale this time, I was slowly making progress on the Lovely Old Dollhouse bedroom .

I added a painted "faux" baseboard, because I had started the mural before I remembered that this room would need a baseboard.........









The only part still to do are all the tiny birds in the trees.......

Mr Peacock has had his tailfeathers painted with gold.......

Here at last, all the little birds are done too......

Time for a closer view......

And on the left hand wall........

You will laugh when you hear that in order to paint all the smaller birds that were too indistinct to copy from the magazine references I had, I went to the internet to look up birds from China. I had always assumed (in my sheer ignorance and provincial outlook) that the amazing colors and shapes of the birds in these wallpapers were exaggerated or made up altogether. They just looked too fanciful to be true! Well, Imagine my surprise when I found the photos of the real birds and could recognize them all in the murals! Amazing colors and shapes are authentic ! Every One! So, you birders out there, go ahead and try to identify them! I just can't remember any of their names... except perhaps the Sunbird!








I am particularly proud of the job I did painting on the right hand wall! I am right handed and in order to get my hand in there and still be able to see where the paint was going, I had to turn myself almost upside down....... and somehow manage not to knock the lights off the wall at the same time!

Details.......



And more......

These are on the left hand wall, so were easier to paint... relatively speaking! I still couldn't get very close......

Left hand wall by the door.....

And more close-up of the right hand wall......

So I was painting the "Tree of Life" and never knew it until Sans!'s post enlightened me.

Thank you Sans!

Chinoiserie or "The Tree of Life"