Can’t afford 13th century Chinese landscape paintings? Get the wallpaper instead
Classic Chinese art by the likes of Zhao Mengfu and Wang Ximeng is the inspiration for luxury wall-covering company de Gournay’s Emperor collection As it expands in China and Hong Kong
Given that luxury UK-based design house de Gournay expanded its Shanghai showroom in 2015, branched into the Beijing market at the same time, and is now scouting for a Hong Kong location, it is perhaps fitting that its Emperor collection takes its cue from famous historical Chinese paintings.
The new line is based heavily on the actual works of famed Chinese artists whose names, granted, may not mean much outside collectors’ circles. But those whose tastes gravitate towards statement-making walls will appreciate the quietly dramatic nature of the new wall coverings.
“We wanted to launch these Chinese styles as the new showrooms in China were opening,” says Jemma Cave, the brand’s design director. “But we wanted also for the designs to be versatile, to end up being used in a modern way.”
We use 18th-century techniques that involve watercolours on a silk background. As a result, these wallpapers age so gracefully
One of the new designs draws heavily from the works of Zhao Mengfu, whose 1287 piece, Mind Landscape of Xie Youyu, is part of the Asian Art Collection at Princeton University Art Museum. His artwork references the blue-green style of landscape painting practised in the Jin and Tang dynasties – evenly spaced trees, flat forms, shades of blues and greens. Cave’s reimagining of the piece as a wall covering certainly imparts the same sense of tranquillity of Zhao’s work – a pale gold background, shades of jade and moss, and soft lines.
Another design is inspired by the Song dynasty’s Wang Ximeng and A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, reportedly his only surviving work and now in the permanent collection of the Palace Museum in Beijing: in the de Gournay rendition, brilliant shades of turquoise punctuate an amber landscape, in a scene that could be as much alpine as Chinese.
“We used the original inspiration of the oil paintings as our actual design – the rich textures on which we build colours,” says Cave. “It was something for the Chinese market, but not just that, necessarily. These are so easily adapted to Western styles.”
The two Chinese showrooms add to existing de Gournay’s outposts in London, Paris, New York and Moscow, and the company works with multi-brand showrooms worldwide. The company’s founder, Claud Cecil Gurney, who began de Gournay in 1986, is a collector of Chinese art, and has much of his wallpaper – Chinese-inspired or otherwise – handmade in a workshop outside Shanghai. He was one of the first British designers to develop production in China, and did so after extensive research on finding craftspeople who knew how to work with paper in the same way as their forefathers.