Decorative plasterwork was created by skilled craftsmen, and for over four hundred years it has been an essential part of the interior decoration of the British country house. In this detailed and comprehensive study, Geoffrey Beard has created a book that will delight the eye and inform the interested reader. For those who have sometimes been puzzled by the complexities of plaster decoration it will be a most useful work of reference on a fascinating art form, about which no book has been published for nearly fifty years. After discussing the part that patrons played in commissioning and financing these beautiful decorations, a useful chapter is devoted to materials and methods of work and here the author describes the ingredients of good plaster; he has studied the work of present-day English plasterers and Swiss stucco-restorers in order to establish precisely how the materials of plaster and stucco were composed and used.

Sumptuous plasterwork ornament is a celebrated and distinctive feature of Ireland's 18th-century domestic architecture. Migrant craftsmen brought the modeling skills and decorative forms of European plasterwork and influenced the emergence of a prolific and idiosyncratic local production. In this volume, specialists from Ireland, Britain, and Europe explore early modern decoration from a range of perspectives that include formal analysis, discussion of technique and workshop practices, and documentation of the social and economic life of artisans. Contents include: Is stucco just the icing on the cake? * Decorative plasterwork in England and Ireland, 1550-1650 * The complex interplay between style and technology * Stucco sculptors from the Lombard lakes in 18th-century Ireland * Baroque stucco in Bohemia and Moravia * 18th-century stucco in Germany * The earning power of stuccatori * Rococo stuccowork in the Netherlands * Bartholomew Cramillion and continental rococo * Recent conservation of Irish 18th-century modeled plaster * Plasterwork production in Britain and Ireland * Decorative designs for quadratura and plasterwork * New light on the court chapel at Wurzburg.

Wallpaper’s spread across trades, class and gender is charted in this first full-length study of the material’s use in Britain during the long eighteenth century. It examines the types of wallpaper that were designed and produced and the interior spaces it occupied, from the country house to the homes of prosperous townsfolk and gentry, showing that wallpaper was hung by Earls and merchants as well as by aristocratic women. Drawing on a wide range of little known examples of interior schemes and surviving wallpapers, together with unpublished evidence from archives including letters and bills, it charts wallpaper’s evolution across the century from cheap textile imitation to innovative new decorative material. Wallpaper’s growth is considered not in terms of chronology, but rather alongside the categories used by eighteenth-century tradesmen and consumers, from plains to flocks, from China papers to papier mâché and from stucco papers to materials for creating print rooms. It ends by assessing the ways in which eighteenth-century wallpaper was used to create historicist interiors in the twentieth century. Including a wide range of illustrations, many in colour, the book will be of interest to historians of material culture and design, scholars of art and architectural history as well as practicing designers and those interested in the historic interior.

Refinement and enrichment of surfaces in stone, wood and plaster is a fundamental aspect of early modern architecture which has been marginalised by architectural history. Enriching Architecture aims to retrieve and rehabilitate surface achievement as a vital element of early modern buildings in Britain and Ireland. Rejected by modernism, demeaned by the conceptual ‘turn’ and too often reduced to its representative or social functions, we argue for the historical legitimacy of creative craft skill as a primary agent in architectural production. However, in contrast to the connoisseurial and developmental perspectives of the past, this book is concerned with how surfaces were designed, achieved and experienced. The contributors draw upon the major rethinking of craft and materials within the wider cultural sphere in recent years to deconstruct traditional, oppositional ways of thinking about architectural production. This is not a craft for craft’s sake argument but an effort to embed the tangible findings of conservation and curatorial research within an evidence-led architectural history that illuminates the processes of early modern craftsmanship. The book explores broad themes of surface treatment such as wainscot, rustication, plasterwork, and staircase embellishment together with chapters focused on virtuoso buildings and set pieces which illuminate these themes.

"Through such everyday articles as linen shirts, wigs, silver teaspoons, pottery plates and engravings, Barnard evokes a striking variety of lives and attitudes. Possessions, he shows, even horses and dogs, highlighted and widened divisions, not only between rich and poor, women and men, but also between Irish Catholics and the Protestant settlers. Displaying fresh evidence and unexpected perspectives, the book throws new light on Ireland during a formative period. Its discoveries, set within the context of the 'consumer revolution' gripping Europe and North America, allow Ireland for the first time to be integrated into discussions of the pleasures and pains of consumerism."--BOOK JACKET.