Essex & Co. Ltd A sample catalogue of over 330 wallpaper designs

, , 1923.

Oblong thick 4to. Firm blue cloth boards with riveted leather straps to spine, leather clasp to fore-edge present but inoperative.

An excellent wallpaper pattern book, dated the year Essex & Co. was acquired by Sanderson, and bringing together more than 330 designs, most printed on the reverse, spanning registered design numbers 2001 to 2338. The sequence opens with the firm’s “cameoid” range: raised, textured papers for relief decoration in the manner of Anaglypta, before broadening into a much wider repertoire of pattern and colourwork. Stylistically the book moves fluidly between Arts & Crafts sensibilities, Art Nouveau line, and an emerging Art Deco or modernist idiom. Several designs feel so far ahead of their moment that a modern eye might place them a decade later, in the 1930s, a testament to how forward-looking the firm’s output had become by this point.

Essex & Co. was founded by Sir R. Walter Essex, who around 1893 brought the architect and designer C. F. A. Voysey on board to produce wallpaper designs for the firm over the following decades. A good number of the patterns in this book are either by Voysey’s hand or clearly derivative of his style. The range is remarkably comprehensive, touching nearly every domestic setting and taste: dense floral chintzes in the Morris tradition sit alongside crisp modernist one- and two-tone colourways, while Chinese and Japanese influenced designs featuring birds and foliage, and faux-tile patterns intended for bathrooms, cluster particularly towards the back of the book. Essex & Co. built its reputation as a foremost name in “art wallpaper,” and is arguably rivalled only by William Morris & Co. in terms of influence on British wallpaper design of the period.

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a substantial collection related to the firm, 62 works dated between 1850 and 1941, including several Voysey-designed papers produced by Essex & Co. that illustrate the collaboration referenced above, among them The Saladin (1897), The Merle, The Fairyland, Feudal, and Cibber (1901). These pieces, several gifted to the museum by Courtaulds Ltd, offer useful comparative material for dating and attributing designs in this pattern book, and situate it within the firm’s broader design output from the 1890s through to its absorption by Sanderson in the 1920s.