I never had the slightest interest in wallpaper. Then Harlem Toile came along.
The wallpaper, which was created by celebrated interior designer Sheila Bridges in 2006, features beautiful drawings of African Americans in the lush historical settings that rarely featured them: a couple in 18th-century dress dance under a structure that recalls the Arc de Triomphe to the tunes of a boombox that rests playfully on the grass; as women in ballgowns sit under a majestic tree, one combs another’s hair while yet another woman holds up a fairy-talelike mirror; a courting couple in fashion that now brings to mind the popular series “Bridgerton” feast on a picnic.
For a Black girl who grew up loving Jane Austen and Toni Morrison with equal aplomb, Harlem Toile was more than wallpaper. It was a tableau of possibility and belonging.
Traditional toile de Jouy (the term translates to “cloth from Jouy,” a suburb outside Paris where it was originally produced) has been popular since the 1700s. Beloved by Marie Antoinette and Joséphine Bonaparte, the fabric typically featured romantic pastoral scenes. Storytelling on fabric was intrinsic to the charm of toile. For example, a pattern drawn by Jean-Baptiste Huet in 1783, called “Le Ballon de Gonesse,” depicts the first hot air balloon flights in France in panels that weave together enchantment, fantasy and scientific advancement, providing for those who were wealthy enough to purchase it a dreamscape that they could use to cover their walls, the canopies of their four-poster beds or whatever else their seamstresses could whip up with the bolts of toile.
Although toile de Jouy has seen hundreds of cheaper knockoffs in recent years, the original was always a luxury good. Harlem Toile de Jouy wallpaper, similarly, is not cheap. I had to save for the handcrafted version ($350 a roll) that was installed on my kitchen wall in fall 2021. But in summer 2020, when the world was still in the early days of the pandemic and the deaths of George Floyd and other Black people wore heavy on the nation, I struggled with finding any sense of safety, so I bought a 28-by-31-inch Harlem Toile wall decal for $85 to serve as my Zoom background as I worked remotely from my bedroom. Every time I looked at the panel, it was a reminder that my ancestors had my back. We had survived the unsurvivable time and time again; cultivating hope wasn’t frivolous, it was essential. Like many fans of Harlem Toile, for me, the pattern is a conversation between the past, the present and a hopeful future, one where Radio Raheem’s boombox lives on forever, one where girls jump double Dutch and Black people ride horses and play hoops.
To truly understand the power of Harlem Toile, said Martha S. Jones, a public historian and professor at Johns Hopkins University, you have to go back 200 years to Bridges’ hometown, Philadelphia, where in the 1820s there was a young white illustrator named Edward Clay. After studying in Paris and London, Clay was shocked to discover a thriving free Black culture when he returned. Well-dressed Black people strolled in the parks and frequented department stores. It was, Jones said, this kind of new sociability. Clay was unsettled by this and created panels of etchings in response. As Jones explained, “The result is a series titled ‘Life in Philadelphia,’ a very cruel, very ugly series of caricatures of Black middle-class figures in Philadelphia in this period. They are adopted, borrowed, circulated widely.”
What happened next is emblematic of how something as simple as wallpaper becomes more than decoration. A French painter, Jean Julien Deltil, borrowed from Clay’s “Life in Philadelphia” to create a series of images with titles like “Vues d’Amérique du Nord” and “Bay of New York” that featured Black middle-class Americans, but not in caricature. Deltil’s designs were made into wallpaper in 1834 by the French firm Zuber & Cie.
In the early 1960s, Jacqueline Kennedy bought that Zuber wallpaper and installed it in the diplomatic reception room in the White House. The wallpaper took on a whole new meaning when the Obamas entered the White House.
“Images of the president and first lady posing alongside the Zuber & Cie wallpaper’s assorted images of elegantly dressed Black Americans, circa 1834, indicate the Obamas’ cognizance of their own emblematic roles almost a century beyond those of the figures depicted in these White House decorations,” Richard Powell, a professor of art history at Duke University, wrote in the book “The Obama Portraits.”
Jones herself has a panel of the Zuber wallpaper installed in her home. As a historian, she said, the emotional tug of living with the figures of Black Americans that Deltil drew with grace and humanity are as important to her as family portraits and mementos.
“The characters on my wallpaper are people I speak to every day,” she said. “I greet them. I live with them, and they stand in for the folks we might know of. And the many we don’t know enough about. And in that way, they’re also precious.”
Harlem Toile continues in the vein of Zuber, a powerful visual foil for the caricatures of Black people in the 1800s, Jones said.
“To look at Harlem Toile is to see Bridges, a daughter of Philadelphia, in a sense, setting the record straight.”
‘Design One for Yourself’
In 2005, in her work as an interior designer, Bridges had used toile de Jouy many times in clients’ homes, but she could never find a design that resonated with her.
“They were beautiful, but I just didn’t want them on my walls, and so I decided, like most designers, why not just design one for yourself?”
The scenes in Harlem Toile draw both from Bridges’ life in the New York City neighborhood where she has lived for nearly 30 years and her childhood growing up in a middle-class African American community in Philadelphia.
Harlem Toile’s correction of negative historical depictions of Black people resonates with many people.
“Think about porcelain,” said Yao-Fen You, senior curator and head of decorative arts at the Cooper Hewitt, where Harlem Toile is in the permanent collection. “Think about Blackamoors. You find some of the most racist imagery in the decorative arts.
“It’s very easy to just be like, ‘Oh, it’s just wallpaper.’ But this kind of imagery just kind of creeps in everywhere. Think about Aunt Jemima imagery. We are so influenced by that. It just becomes subconscious.”
You recently added two additional wallpapers by Bridges to the permanent collection of the Cooper Hewitt; one depicts girls playing hopscotch, and the second takes on the Dutch holiday tradition of Zwarte Piet, or Black Pete.
Meena Harris, founder and CEO of Phenomenal Media, has Harlem Toile wallpaper in two rooms of her home. For her, the luxury of putting up wallpaper is about the security and permanence of housing as opposed to the tenuous nature of housing that has been a throughline in the Black American experience.
“I also think that there’s a whole other conversation to be had around intergenerational wealth and owning and passing on homes,” said Harris, the niece of Vice President Kamala Harris. “That’s also something that we’ve been deprived of, right? It feels almost radical just to say even if this is temporary, this brings me joy. This is something I celebrate, and I’m putting it on the walls and all around me.” — NYT
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