Gore Place: Botanical recreation
Gore Place is a historic country estate outside Boston, Massachusetts, completed in 1806 by Christopher Gore and his wife Rebecca, and admired in its heyday as one of the most beautiful estates in New England. Now owned and operated by the Gore Place Society, it is a popular destination, attracting visitors to outdoor events held on the forty-five-acre grounds and for tours of the restored interiors of the mansion.
For the redecoration of the south-west bedroom, the Gore Place Society selected a fragment of wallpaper and border from the extensive wallpaper archive of Historic New England. The pattern is dated 1800-1815 and described as an ‘all over foliate and vine, reverse printed on a green field with black pin dots on a white ground’. The section of pattern on the fragment is incomplete, and the first stage in reproducing the wallpaper was to invent the missing parts to create a full repeat.
Pin-dot grounds were a widely-used feature of wallpaper and textile patterns in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Some online research identified the distinctively shaped leaves and seed pods as those of the Castor Oil plant Ricinus Communis, combined with tendrils of a second plant, perhaps Morning Glory. By referring to botanical illustrations it was possible to come up with a convincing arrangement to produce a satisfactory repeat pattern. The accompanying border is described in the HNE Archive as a ‘cone and leaf’ pattern and was recreated by referring to other, more complete examples of this type in the collection.
Pin-dot grounds were a widely-used feature of wallpaper and textile patterns in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They added an extra element of visual texture to a pattern, similar to flock or embossing. I found that positioning the hundreds of dots evenly around the leaf shapes on the computer screen took more time than I expected, but it must have taken longer still for the nineteenth-century block maker to drive all those little nails into the wooden surface of the printing block before grinding them down to a flat surface that would print consistently.
The Castor Oil plant has been used since ancient times in folk medicine, even though the seeds and other parts of it can be extremely toxic, indeed fatal.
The Castor Oil plant has been used since ancient times in folk medicine, even though the seeds and other parts of it can be extremely toxic, indeed fatal. Indigenous to Mediterranean and African climates, it is grown in gardens across the world for its decorative qualities. It was presumably the unusual form of the seed heads and leaves which drew it to the attention of an early nineteenth-century pattern designer, but to what extent the plant was recognized by the consumers who purchased the wallpaper is not known. As an expert gardener and early supporter of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Rebecca Gore would surely have approved of the choice of pattern.
Gore Place, Waltham, Mass., home of Governor Christopher Gore (1758-1827), established 1786, house built 1806. Image credit Digital Commonwealth