Japanned Papier Mache and Tinware c. 1740-1940

A long overdue history of this fascinating decorative art, illustrated with stunning colour throughout. "a well-written, well-referenced and well-illustrated book. It provides a valuable addition to the literature and our understanding of a previously little-researched facet of the industrial midlands" British Art Journal "Cataloguers now have an impressive volume of new information to draw on when describing anything from a simple tea tray to those suites of papier mâché furniture which remain as impressive today as when they dazzled visitors at the great international exhibitions of the 19th century" Antiques Trade Gazette As one of the few decorative arts about which little has been written, japanning is today fraught with misunderstandings. And yet, in its heyday, the japanning industry attracted important commissions from prestigious designers such as Robert Adam, and orders from fashionable society across Europe and beyond. This book is a long overdue history of the industry which centred on three towns in the English midlands: Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Bilston. It is as much about the workers, their skills, and the factories and workshops in which they laboured, as it is about the goods they made. It tells of matters of taste and criticism, and of how an industry which continued to rely so heavily upon hand labour in the machine age reached its natural end in the 1880s with a few factories lingering into the late 1930s. Richly illustrated, it includes photographs of mostly marked, or well-documented, examples of japanned tin and papier mâché against which readers may compare - and perhaps identify - unmarked specimens. Japanned Papier Mâché and Tinware draws predominantly upon contemporary sources: printed, manuscript and typescript documents, and, for the…