Wallpaper Panel

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This wallpaper panel is part of a set originally consisting of seventeen pieces (see 14.106.1–.16 for set.). The panels depict mountain landscapes, scenes with houses, birds, and flowering shrubs. They were hand-painted in China during the early eighteenth century for export to England. There, as in America, such exotic wallpaper enjoyed a vogue among the fashionable gentry. Considered a great luxury, it added richness and colors to walls. This wallpaper hung in an English home for two hundred years. The panels are installed, in whole or in part, in the Powel Room in The American Wing.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art