Victorian Wallpaper Panels with Opera and Masquerade Illustration

30 September 2019 · Manchester

A museum wall holds a collision of decorative wallpaper panels, each pattern pulling in a different direction — gold floral damask, crimson botanical repeat, teal arabesque — and at the centre, a vivid illustrated scene of an opera house in full masquerade. Costumed dancers crowd the floor beneath an ornate proscenium arch labelled 'Opera'; the crowd spills across two stacked repeats of the same panel. The decorative arts tradition carries two ambitions at once: wallpaper as background, and wallpaper as spectacle in its own right.