Introducing: Endpapers

Beyond the Pages – Zoffany’s Inspired Wallpaper Collection

An intriguing antecedent to wallpaper, the story of the endpapers – beyond the pages of a book – is the inspiration behind Zoffany’s latest wallpaper collection, which pays homage to its first wallpaper restoration project.

If you prise apart the layers of wallpapers within the upstairs rooms or corridors of an historic English home, there’s a chance you might come across a fragment of an endpaper.

Endpapers are curious pieces of design. We’re more familiar with them as the fixed inside pages of a beginning or end of a book, but these leaves of paper were also used as some of the earliest precedents of wallpaper in the more hidden rooms of a historic home.

Guiding Zoffany’s Endpaper collection is one of Zoffany’s earliest designs: Diamonds & Flowers. Dated around 1750-1770, it’s a design that was discovered as a fragment by Zoffany on the top floor of the west wing in Temple Newsam, a Tudor-Jacobean residence in North Yorkshire, where Zoffany was founded to restore its wallpapers.

Quiet, interior, enduring; across the collection, the designs feature subtle, small-scale motifs of floral tracery, delicate mandorlas, and vermicelli linework that meanders. Its tone is one of contemplation and interiority – matching its original room context and its literary precedent.