Blame it on the wallpaper

 My whole adventure into the Aesthetic began with the wallpaper I found in the attic stairwell one rainy day after I moved to this old home in PA.  It was fragmented and very damaged by the years.  Picking at the 6+ layers, the first layer (and the nicest) was this olive colorway paper.  Over the past year, I have managed to remove a large portion of it from the top of the stairwell where it was applied to the wooden boards on a base of material.  The other walls it is on are plaster and concrete.  The horsehair filled plaster is the wall that has the most colorful and well preserved sections, but there is no safe way to remove it entirely.  I resorted to putting a decoupage over top of these to keep them more stable.
The first part of the pattern that I had uncovered was butterflies in a circle.  Then a super busy, crazy pattern with stars, mums, another large butterfly, circles, squares, some sort of beetle? and spiderwebs.  The colors are olives, black, reds, yellows and gold gilding heavily throughout.  Most of this color is faded and damaged on the material backed paper.  The colors are amazingly vivid and well preserved on the more stable plaster walls.


I have been able to put together most all of a repeat of the pattern.  I am slowly going to try to fill in the missing areas so that I can duplicate and save this interesting paper.  I had contacted several wallpaper reproduction companies here in the USA and was informed that this was a high end Aesthetic paper from the late 1800's.  In the past year of trying to find out an answer to what this was, I have learned more about this buried period of our history that I don't ever remember learning in History or in Art back in school.
I am researching the history of this house (which will be in a future post) and decided to redecorate it in the period of this paper.
If anyone has an idea who made this paper, please contact me.  I would love to find a complete repeat of the pattern.

The photo at the left shows an entire repeat pieced together.