This exhibition looks at the way that Japanese-inspired design ideas were adapted for British homes by one company, the Silver Studio, between around 1880 and 1930. Designers working for the Silver Studio incorporated Japanese motifs and methods into wallpaper and textile patterns for British consumers. They took various design ideas which they saw as ¡ÆJapanese¡Ç and adapted them to suit their customers¡Ç tastes. The resulting patterns are not straightforwardly ¡ÆJapanese¡Ç, but are instead the result of a fascinating process of cross-cultural fertilisation of design ideas.

Britain first experienced a craze for all things Japanese in the 1870s and 80s. Japan opened up to trade with the West after a long period of isolation. Europeans saw Japanese art and design as exciting and exotic, because it was so different to Western culture.

The Silver Studio was a commercial design practice, based in West London, founded by Arthur Silver in 1880. The Studio produced designs for wallpapers and textiles which were sold to retailers and manufacturers, in Britain and abroad. Arthur Silver probably never visited Japan himself, but he was an avid collector of Japanese source material. In an article in of 1894, the Studio was described as being full of visual reference material similar to that collected by artists: ¡ÈPhotographs after Botticelli and other old masters, panels of lustrous enamels and gesso-work, scraps of fine fabrics, and books of Japanese drawings...¡É Using these sources, the Silver Studio designers incorporated Japanese ideas into their designs for wallpapers and textiles, while adapting them to appeal to British consumers.

In the 1920s and 30s signifiers of ¡ÆJapanese-ness¡Ç and exoticism had shifted but the Studio was still producing what customers wanted. By this time, designers appear to have relied less on genuine Japanese sources, but instead worked with vaguer notions of ¡Æthe Orient¡Ç. The designers continued to collect reference material as design inspiration, and also to return to design sources acquired many years before.

The exhibition will be an opportunity to see some wonderful Japanese and Japanese-inspired objects including original katagami stencils, as well as textiles and wallpapers designed by the Silver Studio.

Japantastic opens on 15th September 2009 and continues until 1st August 2010. Admission is FREE.


For more information please see the website www.moda.mdx.ac.uk

Printed silk with a design by the Silver Studio's Winifred Mold, 1919, featuring a striking, modern pattern of Japanese parasols. Silver Studio Collection, Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture