Fruit-Patterned Wallpaper – Dining Room

Fragments of wallpaper removed from the walls during the refurbishment that preceded the museum’s opening in 1954 were found in the castle. Together they revealed five successive decorative phases in the Dining Room. Traces of paint and stencilling survive on the reverse and beneath the papers, recording how the walls were finished before the wallpapers were hung in the nineteenth century.

Photographs document the room at four points in its history: with the wallpapers in place, immediately after their removal — when the earlier decoration became visible — after the later refurbishment in blue, and as it appears today, following the reproduction.

The fragments were photographed with a colour reference target placed in the same plane and lighting, so that the colours could be recorded as measurable values rather than as an impression on screen. Measurements were carried out exclusively on protected archival fragments that had never been installed on the walls and had therefore retained their original colours.

Where the pattern was missing, it was completed using motifs documented on the surviving fragments themselves. No element was invented. Analysis of the paint layers identified earth pigments bound in animal glue.

The final paper now covers the walls of the Dining Room, in the pattern and at the scale its owners chose for it in the nineteenth century.

Archive photographs:

Photographs taken before, during and after the installation of the reproductions: