A short history of pattern

Pattern holds a mirror up to society, so let’s take a quick dash through history and track its trail to date...

'Libertad' cushion by Lelièvre Paris, from the 'Evasions' collection. Still one of my favourites.

Since the dawn of time humans have decorated their spaces with mark-making; inscriptions and pictures to tell their stories. Whether these were early cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphics or the traditional wall art of Burkina Faso, they were also a notation of belonging; ‘patterns’ to signify ownership — a statement from the scribe that ‘this place is mine’.

However, until mankind lived longer than the purported average of 30 years, decoration within a dwelling was not exactly a priority. Any sense of ornament was primarily the preserve of objects rather than interiors — carved amulets, jewellery, platters and pots — with fitness for purpose rather than beauty being the goal. By the 17^thand 18^thCenturies though, this had shifted with ornamentation becoming a status symbol, the preserve of the elite, and monarchs, alone.

Decoration was a means to show off, of literally having enough wealth to paper your walls with it — consider the Palace of Versailles — and the patterns themselves were determinedly emblematic of pomp and prestige: crests, laurels, crowns and other such representations of heightened hierarchy.

A commode designed by Jean-Henri Reisener (1734 -1806) and made for the Palace of Versailles in 1776.

It was around this time that the British furniture maker Thomas Chippendale became the go-to for decorative cabinetry and upholstery, producing extraordinarily detailed confections which owed a large debt to Chinoiserie alongside gilding, ribbons, swirls, scrolls, flowers, cherubs and ancient urns. Following his example, designers increasingly borrowed from anything and everything regardless of provenance or context; a look which persisted into the early 19^thCentury.

One only need picture the exotic onion-shaped domes of the Brighton Pavilion, added in 1822 by the architect John Nash, as a prime example. This seaside folly cum pleasure palace for the Prince Regent, with its flamboyantly theatrical interiors by the London decorator John C Crace, plundered the Orient to the English countryside for ideas, and was quite the place to be seen.

The Royal Brighton Pavillion, built as a seaside pleasure palace for King George IV and extended into the splendid Oriental wonder that we see today by architect John Nash in 1815.

This hand-painted paper was supplied in 1817 by Frederick Crace for the Saloon in the Royal Pavilion. It was described in the Crace ledgers as a ‘very fine set of India Paper, green ground, coloured flowers, birds, etc.’

But then fashions swing with the regularity of a pendulum, and so this eclectic madness was followed by NeoClassicism: a period of renewed reverence for classical forms.