Japan-tastic

In the 1870s and 80s, Britain experienced a craze for all things Japanese. Japanese art and design was seen as exciting and exotic by Europeans, because it was so different to Western culture. It offered a whole new way of looking at and representing the world.

Arthur Silver was a British designer of wallpapers and textiles. He established his company, the Silver Studio, in 1880. He and his colleagues were avid collectors of Japanese source material. They incorporated Japanese ideas into their designs, while ensuring that they appealed to the mass market. The Silver Studio continued to flourish in the twentieth century, with oriental-inspired wallpapers becoming popular in the 1920s.

This exhibition looks at how the Silver Studio adapted Japanese materials, methods and motifs between about 1880 and 1930. The Studio incorporated these into designs for wallpapers and textiles that appealed to British consumers The resulting designs are not straightforwardly ‘Japanese’ but are the result of a cross-cultural fertilisation of design ideas. The exhibition will be an opportunity for visitors to see some of the many wonderful Japanese and Japanese-inspired objects from the Silver Studio collection, including textiles, wallpapers and original Japanese katagami or stencils.