Wall decorations on paper in Baroque castles in Austria Part II: Chinese wallpapers and their restoration

1 HISTORY In the second half of the eighteenth century at least one room in almost every Baroque castle was decorated with .Chinese wallpaper, which was imported from China or, later on, made by Chinese living in England. Nonetheless, only a few examples of these wallpapers are still preserved in situ. Being made of paper, they would not have been valuable enough to go on serving a decorative purpose once the Rococo fashion had-passed. One of the few surviving Chinese wallpapers in Austria probably came from the Imperial Castle of Schlosshof at Marchfeld, which Maria Theresa acquired from Prince Eugene [1]. This Chinese wallpaper is painted with scenes from everyday life, but nothing is known of its origins. The lack of documentary evidence also makes dating impossible since Chinese wallpapers mass-produced for the European market in the eighteenth century are chronologically almost indistinguishable in respect of subject, style and technique [2,3,4,5]. ' The wallpaper must have been removed from the wall for safety during the Second WorId War and is no doubt identical with the one deposited in a damaged state in the Museum fUr Angewandte Kunst in Vienna at the end of the war. Schlosshof itself was in a poor structural condition which made it impossible to return the wallpaper .to its original location, so a new solution had to be found. In 1967 the Museum fUr Angewandte Kunst wanted to refurnish Riegersburg Castle in Lower Austria in the Rococo style following restoration work to repair serious damage inflicted in the war and this provided an opportunity of using -a large part of the wallpaper from Schlosshof for one of the rooms. Those lengths of wallpaper which were in a better state of preservation· were chosen for Riegersburg and were restored around 1966 by specialists at the Akademie fUr Bildenden KUnste in Vienna. These strips of paper have been on display on the walls of an unheated room in Riegersburg Castle since 1967 [6]. No further deterioration has been detected since then. The rest of the wallpaper (about 15 strips) has been kept in storage in the museum as no other use has yet been found for it. Two further lengths of the paper were restored at the Akademie in 1978-79 (Fig. 1). The work involved is described below.