Secrets of the Morris-Jumel Mansion—Part 6:

Envisioning an Eighteenth-Century Dining Room

By Margaret A. Oppenheimer, author of The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel

Looking for a different secret of the Morris-Jumel Mansion? Click these links for part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 7, and part 8.

How was the dining room of the Morris-Jumel Mansion decorated during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? The earliest surviving images, dating from the 1880s, show it cluttered with knickknacks and hung with four different wallpapers that reach up to and even cover the ceiling. But an intriguing bit of evidence offers a tantalizing hint at what came before. The factoid is found in the Historical sketch of Washington's headquarters by Emma A. F. Smith, a handbook produced after the Morris-Jumel Mansion was turned into a museum at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Eliza Jumel's great-niece and namesake, Eliza Jumel Chase Caryl, provided Smith with a small detail about the decoration of the mansion in her great aunt's day. The dining room walls, she said, "were a dark green, about the color of a lily leaf, and furnished at the top with a band of gold, three fingers wide."

Detail of an oil painting showing Eliza Jumel's niece and namesake as a young woman.

Eliza Jumel's niece and namesake as a young woman. Detail of a portrait at the Morris-Jumel Mansion.

Most unfortunately, Caryl did not specify the era at which the green paper hung in the dining room, nor whether it was chosen by Eliza and Stephen Jumel, who purchased the house in 1810, or if instead they found it on the walls when they acquired the property.

When, then, could the paper have been manufactured? Certainly solid-colored wallpapers had come into fashion by the time the Morris-Jumel Mansion was built in the mid-1760s. Blue, green, and straw were the favored hues, with narrow papier-mâché borders, covered with gold leaf, fastened to the top of such wall coverings to form a gilded border. Benjamin Franklin adopted this mode for one of the rooms in his home in 1765, instructing his wife to "paint the wainscot a dead white, paper the walls blue, and tack a gilt border around the cornice." Similar wall coverings were installed in the Ballroom (blue paper) and Supper Room (green paper) of the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg in the late 1760s.

Photograph of the Supper Room in the Governor’s Palace in Colonial Williamsburg, restored to its appearance in 1768-70.

The Supper Room in the Governor’s Palace in Colonial Williamsburg, restored to its appearance in 1768–70. The palace burned down in 1781 and was rebuilt in the twentieth century, so the room and wallpaper are reproductions based on archeological and archival documentation.

Photograph showing a detail of the gold borders of the wallpaper in the Supper Room of the Governor’s Palace in Colonial Williamsburg.

The narrow gold borders crafted for the 2006 re-creation of the Supper Room were applied just above the wainscoting (wood paneling) and at the top of the wall. They were made out of paper, rather than molded like the originals in paper-maché. But they were fastened to the wall with tacks as papier-mâché borders would have been, to give the paper imitations the illusion of three-dimensionality.

The style was still in vogue two decades later—George Washington inquired in 1784 about acquiring a blue or green paper and papier-mâché borders—but by then a range of decorative paper borders were available as well, soon displacing papier-mâché. A sample book from a French wallpaper manufacturer, dating from approximately 1785 to 1795, contains several narrow borders designed to imitate gilded cornices. Similar examples from another French factory were made in 1799.

French wallpaper borders pasted in a sample book, circa 1785 to 95.

Wallpaper borders from a sample book used by the Réveillon factory and/or Jacquemart et Bénard, ca. 1785–95. Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1986-34-1-1/314.

Another page ofFrench wallpaper borders in a sample book, circa 1785 to 95.

More wallpaper borders from a sample book used by the Réveillon factory and/or Jacquemart et Bénard, ca. 1785–95. Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1986-34-1-1/314.

These two bands of a wallpaper border, made by the R. Bon factory in Paris in 1799, would have been cut apart horizontally before installation. Printing them in rows on a sheet was more economical than leaving unused paper on either side of a narrow border—6.5 cm wide in this case (2.5 in.). Bibliothèque nationale de France, EST LI-20.

More elaborate borders were available too. In 1787, for instance, Gerardus Duyckinck of New York City offered his customers monochrome green and blue, American-made papers, accompanied by "Festoon Borders." The overall effect is captured in this watercolor, which must date from the second half of the 1790s, judging from the women's clothing. As you can see here, from the mid-1780s through the 1820s, paper borders were pasted not only just below the ceiling (where they were called "friezes") but also around architectural elements such as doors, fireplaces, and wainscoting (the wood paneling covering the lower portion of walls).

Watercolor by Benjamin Thompson of a harpsichord recital, painted in the 1790s.

Benjamin Thompson, Harpsichord Recital at Count Rumford's, Concord, New Hampshire. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1971.83.34. Straw-colored wallpaper hangs over the fireplace. Other areas of wall appear to be papered in green verditer, a bluish green shade immensely popular in wallpapers of the second half of the eighteenth century. The same festoon border edges both the straw and green sidewalls.

A sample of green verditer paint, a popular color in wallpapers in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Green verditer paint sample from Lancashire Wallpaper and Paint, UK. Green verditer wallpapers were manufactured and sold by Gerardus Duyckinck of New York City in 1787, along with his festoon borders.

Wide friezes were preferred to narrow ones by the beginning of the nineteenth century, so if Eliza Caryl was accurate in describing the Morris-Jumel dining room border as "three fingers wide"—approximately 2 inches (five centimeters) or a shade over, measured on a woman's hand—then the most likely time for its production would have been ca. 1765–ca. 1785 (if the border was papier-mâché) or ca. 1785–ca. 1800 (if a printed border). (Although Thomas Chippendale mentions installing printed borders in England in the 1760s, early references to gilded borders in America refer to the paper-mâché type, suggesting that the printed versions did not arrive on our shores until after the Revolutionary War.) In either case, the wallpaper would have been something that Eliza and Steven Jumel found on the walls of the dining room when they acquired the mansion and perhaps left in situ for some years.

Using PowerPoint and Photoshop, I have developed some rudimentary mockups suggesting how the dining room might have looked. My first two images show a narrow gilt border at the top of the wall, crowning sidewalls of two different shades of green.

Dining room at the Morris-Jumel Mansion, shown with a mockup of wallpaper like that that might have hung in the room in the late-eighteenth century.

Conjectural appearance of the dining room wallpaper at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in the late-eighteenth century.

Another mockup of the Morris-Jumel Mansion dining room wallpaper, as it might have looked after years of light exposure.

Another mockup of the Morris-Jumel Mansion dining room, showing how the pigment of the green wallpaper might have changed after years of exposure to light.

The colors of the sidewalls were inspired by a fragment of wallpaper hung about 1762 in the James Geddy House in Williamsburg, Virginia. The brighter green area of the fragment was hidden from the light by an overlapping sheet of wallpaper and retains its original coloring. The darker green portion reveals how the pigment was altered by years of light exposure. My paired images, provided with similarly colored papers, suggest how the Morris-Jumel Mansion wallpaper might have looked 1) as originally hung and 2) some years later.

A fragment of English wallpaper, ca. 1762.

English wallpaper, ca. 1762. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1966-164, reproduced from Welsh, “Investigation, Analysis, and Authentication of Historic Wallpaper Fragments,” p. 93, fig. 2.

It is possible that gold borders were used to outline the architectural features and not just the top of the wall, so I created a third mockup modeling that possibility. (In describing the decoration of the dining room, Eliza Caryl was probably relaying information shared with her by her great aunt, and what she was told or remembered might have been incomplete.)

Another mockup of the appearance of the Morris-Jumel Mansion dining room circa 1800.

Another possibility for the appearance of the Morris-Jumel Mansion dining room ca. 1800.

I suspect that my borders in these mockups appear wider and more prominent than they should—I did not have the precise measurements of the wall with which to determine the proportions. Also, the brighter of my two green papers is not an exact match for the light-protected area of the Williamsburg sample, which is a slightly bluer green, and my darker paper differs modestly from its model as well. However, I hope that the three reconstructions will give you a rough impression of what the dining room might have looked like in 1810, when Eliza and Stephen Jumel acquired the home called Mount Morris, the house we know today as New York's Morris-Jumel Mansion.

Note on the Sources: Jonathan Thornton discusses eighteenth-century papier-mâché borders in "The history, technology, and conservation of architectural papier-mâché," Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 32, no. 2, article 7 (1993): 165–76. The modern restoration of the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg is described in Roberta Laynor, "Governor's Palace 2006 Closing Summary," Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library Research Report Series - RR1709, July 2006 (Williamsburg, Virginia, 2007); available at http://research.history.org/DigitalLibrary/view/index.cfm?doc=ResearchReports%5CRR1709.xml. George Washington's inquiry about wallpaper with papier-mâché borders has been published online by the National Archives and is available at http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-01-02-0037. Benjamin Franklin's instructions to his wife about decorating a room are quoted in Alan Victor Sugden and John Ludlum Edmundson, A history of English wallpaper, 1509–1914 (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., [1925], p. 51. Chippendale's use of paper as well as papier-mâché borders is referenced in the same publication, e.g., pp. 83–85. The wallpaper ad placed by Gerardus Duyckinck appeared in the Daily Advertiser on April 12, 1787, and was published by William Kelby in "Notes on American Artists," New York Historical Society Quarterly Bulletin 4, no. 1 (April 1920): 27. For the wallpaper fragment from the James Geddy House, see Frank S. Welsh, "Investigation, Analysis, and Authentication of Historic Wallpaper Fragments," Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 43, no. 1 (Spring 2004), 91-110. Note that on page 92, the fragment is said to have been installed in the house in the "1960s," but this is clearly a typographical error for "1760s," as the discussion on pages 92–93 makes clear. Those who have read part 5 of my Secrets of the Morris-Jumel Mansion, about an eighteenth-century wallpaper fragment from the Morris-Jumel, will note the similarity between its bulbous leaf forms and those of the smallest leaves on the Colonial Williamsburg fragment—another indicator that the Morris-Jumel remnant could date from the 1760s.

Looking for more secrets of the Morris-Jumel Mansion? Click these links to find part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, and part 8.

An Update

Since writing the study above, I came across two more images showing solid-colored wallpaper with gold borders. I include them here to offer a fuller picture of the possibilities available to the eighteenth-century homeowner. Most probably the first portrait was painted in England and the second in Germany. Wall treatments fashionable in Europe, such as those seen in these pictures, were adopted quickly in the United States.

A gentleman at breakfast, attributed to the English painter Henry Walton, ca. 1775–80. Toledo Museum of Art, 1956.77. The narrow gold border runs along the wainscoting and encircles the door. It would have bordered the top edge of the wall as well.

Johann Eckstein, Samels Family, 1788. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 59.194, Ellen Kelleran Gardner Fund. Here, too, the upper edge of the wall is not visible, but we can see the decorative gold border just above the wainscoting. It is possible that the room was painted and stenciled rather than papered, but given the elegance of the carpet, the use of wallpaper seems more likely.