Westport House: from Canton to Westport

The wallpaper in the Chinese room at Westport House, County Mayo, was painted by hand in the Chinese port city of Canton in the late eighteenth century and brought to Europe on a ship of the East India Company. The paper is in many ways well preserved, but the passage of time and the presence of damp have resulted in some serious issues, calling for a complete conservation of the room. The project began under the previous owners of Westport House, when specialist Mark Sandiford proposed a programme of conservation to be carried out by him with the assistance of local conservators.

A pilot project carried out in 2014 showed that the method proposed by Mark would be successful. Since then the house has passed to new owners and is the focus of a multi-million euro restoration which will last many years. In 2021, as work began in the interior of the house, it became necessary to take the wallpaper off the walls and store it until the room was ready for it to be put back. Paper conservator Ros Devitt and I spent a week slowly and painstakingly separating the fragile paper from the wall, then laying each sheet out on a specially prepared storage rack which would allow air to circulate around the paper, keeping it dry. In the process, we uncovered a block-printed paper and border made in Dublin in 1817, showing that the Chinese paper, while made in the eighteenth century, was not put up here until much later.

The next stage of this multi-year project will be to carefully remove all the old, degraded lining material and plaster debris from the back of the sheets – a time-consuming job and hard on the fingertips - before re-lining each one using sheets of Japanese paper. Then they can be re-installed over a special ‘pocket’ lining system, designed to protect the historic paper from movement in the wall and to make it easier to take down in the future, should the need arise.

Read more about the restoration here.