The Print Room/ Castletown House
The Print Room is
one of the most important rooms at Castletown. It is the only fully
intact eighteenth century print room left in Ireland. During Lady
Louisa’s time it became popular for ladies to collect their
favourite prints and then arrange and paste them on to the walls of a
chosen room, along with decorative borders. At Castletown, Louisa,
together with her sister Sarah, decorated this former ante room in
1768. She had been collecting prints since at least 1762, and the
Print Room can be seen as a scrapbook of mid eighteenth century
culture and taste. Included amongst the prints is Joshua Reynolds’
portrait of Louisa’s sister Sarah, sacrificing herself to the
graces. Continuing the family theme the north wall features a print
after Van Dyck of the children of Charles I, including the future
Charles II, Louisa’s great grandfather. Contemporary popular culture
is represented by two prints of the leading actor David Garrick; he
is pictured between the muses of tragedy and comedy above the
fireplace, and with the actress Sarah Cibber on the opposite wall.
Amongst the artists featured are, Rembrandt, Guido Reni, Teniers and
Le Bas.
Unusually this print
room survived changes in taste and fashion, although the room seems
to have been slightly rearranged in the mid 19th century. In the late
nineteenth century this room was used as a billiards room but the
present furnishings more accurately reflect its original purpose as a
small or private sitting room.
The English Print Room Phenomenon
Posted on 19 March
2010 by Kathryn Kane
The phenomenon of
the English Print Room …
The original print
rooms in great houses across the Continent were exactly what one
might suppose them to be, rooms in which fine art prints were
displayed. From the seventeenth century right though to the
mid-nineteenth century, the print room was a feature of many homes of
wealthy gentlemen who were connoisseurs of art. These print rooms
were typically smaller in size than a gallery for the display of
paintings, in keeping with the smaller size of most prints. The
prints displayed in these rooms could be rare or unique, and were
always of great value.
As had been done for
centuries, the prints might be kept in cabinets or in shallow drawers
in tables, should they be very fine or unusual prints. Alternately,
they might be kept in albums, often leather bound, to protect them
from the light. Each print was mounted on an album page of heavy
paper and originally, parallel lines of ink or watercolor borders
were made around the print on the paper. Often these parallel lines
were filled in with a colored watercolor wash, giving the effect of a
frame around the print. Or, the print might actually be framed on its
page by a paper frame made especially for the purpose. By the latter
decades of the eighteenth century, these paper frames had become very
popular and were usually designed and produced by the same
print-makers who were making the prints which they framed. Some print
collectors would use a wide and varying range of frame styles for
these paper frames, but others would settle on a single paper frame
style designed solely for their use. Once such collector who had his
own print frame design was the artist Thomas Lawrence, who had one of
the finest print collections ever assembled.
In some cases, the
prints were framed, sometimes under glass, and hung on the walls of
the print room, skyed as paintings would have been, that is, the wall
was carpeted with many prints in various sizes, hung in tiers from
the cornice or crown molding to the dado or chair rail. In many cases
in such print rooms, the walls were curtained, as were the walls of
some painting galleries. These curtains would be kept closed over the
prints, except when they were being viewed, in order to protect them
from light damage.
Another version of
the print room, which was found only in Britain, blended the
techniques of album and wall display. The prints were mounted
directly on the walls of the print room and were framed with the
paper print frames typically used to frame prints in albums. They
were arranged on the print room walls in skyed fashion, just as
actual framed prints would have been. An example of this blended type
of print room is the Print Room at Uppark in West Sussex. Prints
displayed in this way were typically inexpensive and commonly
available copies of popular paintings, rather than rare fine art
prints. These prints might be hand-colored or, more often they were
grisaille, in either shades of gray or sepia.
Print rooms of this
type were more likely to be seen in the homes of those without the
financial resources of affluent connoisseurs. Those with a taste for
art without the wealth to afford original paintings often purchased
the less expensive engravings of those works which they could display
in their homes in the same way the aristocracy displayed their
expensive paintings. For example, young Englishmen who took the Grand
Tour on a budget would acquire prints and engravings as souvenirs,
rather than paintings and sculpture. These engravings would then be
displayed in the print rooms of their homes when they returned.
Often, the decoration of these print rooms would be done by their
wives, sisters or mothers.
By the
mid-eighteenth century, many ladies, in all ranks of society,
collected inexpensive prints, often on a specific theme, like
animals, landscapes or mythological scenes. When they had gathered
enough, they would paste their prints to the walls of a small sitting
or dressing room. If they were impatient, they might decorate one
wall of a room as soon as they had enough prints, doing each
additional wall as they gathered more prints. Some young girls would
begin collecting such prints in anticipation of decorating a small
room in their home after they married. It was at about this time that
many stationers, printers and some booksellers sold the paper frames,
ribbon swags and other decorative paper embellishments which these
ladies needed to enhance their personal print rooms.
This last type of
print room was known only in Britain and occassionally in America.
There are no instances of this method of print display in Europe. It
also seems clear that these print rooms were seldom, if ever,
decorated by professional decorators. Most of these print rooms were
very personal spaces, most often decorated by the lady or ladies who
used them, even in rather grand houses. There are a few instances of
print rooms which were more public in nature, such as that at Uppark,
but in most cases, even those were most often the product of the
members of the household, usually female, who selected the prints,
decided their arrangement and color scheme, and affixed the prints
and their paper embellishments to the walls.
By the end of the
eighteenth century, instead of pasting the prints directly on the
walls of the room, it became the practice to paper the walls first
with a plain paper of a single, usually pale, color. The print rooms
in less affluent homes were papered with uncolored paper-hangings
which were painted after they were affixed to the wall. In either
case, once the paper was hung and dry, the prints would then be
pasted to that, after which the paper frames, ribbon swags and other
paper embellishments would be pasted to the walls to complete the
design.
Paper-stainers,
those who manufactured paper-hangings, soon got the idea of making
paper-hangings which were essentially ready-made print rooms. These
papers where covered with images of prints surrounded by paper frames
and other embellishments on a solid color ground. Once hung, they
were a good approximation of a print room with significantly less
effort. These paper-hangings, like the earlier print rooms, were
found only in Great Britain, and occasionally in America. There is
some evidence that sets of print-room papers were exported to Europe,
but not in high volume. These papers sold reasonably well in England,
but they did not replace the real print room. Even into the Regency,
there were too many ladies across the country who had their heart set
on creating their own print room to be willing to settle for one
ready-made of paper-hangings.
There are a few
large houses that have print rooms which are still intact. One of
these, the only one in Ireland, can still be seen at Castletown House
in County Kildare, Ireland. This was the home of Lady Louisa Lennox
Connolly, and her husband, Thomas Connolly. It is known that the
prints for this room were being collected as early as 1762. This room
has cream-colored walls covered with sepia-tone prints and
embellishments which Lady Louisa and her friends cut out and applied
to the walls. I had an opportunity to see this print room in person
when I was living in Ireland years ago. Though the room is rather
larger than the average print room, it is still a cozy, charming and
essentially feminine room, as were the majority of print rooms
created by the many English ladies who decorated their own personal
print rooms from the mid-eighteenth century though the early
nineteenth century.
Though the fashion
for print rooms in England began in the mid-eighteenth century, it
continued into the years of the Regency and there is no reason print
rooms could not be woven into the plot of a Regency romance. Ladies
might get together to help a friend prepare the prints and
embellishments to be affixed to a print room wall, gossiping all the
while. A young lady with a love of art might secretly plan her own
small print room, carefully collecting prints with botanical designs
or scenes from Aesop’s Fables, perhaps slipping out to the print
shops from time to time to search for more prints for her collection.
An impoverished widow might have to give up hope of her own print
room and settle for a room papered with a set of inexpensive
paper-hangings with a print-room design.
I was pleasantly
surprised to discover, during the course of my research for this
article, that the English print room has not faded into the mists of
history. I found two different web sites which offer services for
creating print rooms in the twenty-first century. I have no
affiliation with either of these companies, but both of them have a
number of good images of print rooms and offer services for those who
are interested in having their own print rooms two hundred and fifty
years after they were first fashionable. You can visit Holly Moore
Interiors or The English Print Room, for more information.
Castletown House, Celbridge, County Kildare, Ireland, is a Palladian country house built in 1722 for William Conolly, the Speaker of the Irish House of Commons.It formed the centrepiece of a 550-acre (220 ha) estate. Sold to developers in 1965, the estate is now divided between State and private ownership.
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