Dutch Pink Discovery 46/7 Vase

In Jane Austen’s home in Chawton, fragments of historic wallpaper were discovered in the Drawing Room in the late 1940s, when Jane Austen’s House was being turned into a museum. They were found on the plaster covering a bricked-up window, now hidden behind Rev Austen’s bookcase. This window, which looked straight onto the main road, was bricked up by Edward Austen in 1809 to give his mother and sisters more privacy. The wallpaper design dates from about 1800 and is based on a vine leaf. It is printed in red and ‘Dutch Pink’, a curiously-named yellow pigment that was popular in the Regency period.

In 2016 the Museum commissioned historic wallpaper specialists Hamilton Weston Wallpaper Ltd to reconstruct the pattern from the historic fragments and to create a replica wallpaper to be hung in the Drawing Room. The reproduction wallpaper has been made using the same hand block printing processes that would have been used in the nineteenth century.

The reproduction paper is known as ‘Chawton Vine’ and now hangs in the Dining Room, as it would have done in the Austen’s day. Emma’s tribute to this incredible find, can be clearly seen in soft, muted colour palette that she has used to create her version of the vine at Moorcroft. The clever use of a soft clotted cream coloured clay helps to add to the heritage feel of the design, where each of the myriad tiny dots along the stems of each vine leaf have been tubelined by hand, one at a time.

Ex Tax: £537.50

• Designer: Emma Bossons
• Dimensions: H 17.50 x W 11.00 x D 11.00 cm
• Availability: Please allow up to 4 weeks for delivery