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 Ms. Bridges’s hometown, Philadelphia, where in the 1820s there was a young white illustrator named Edward Clay. After studying abroad 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, Ms. Jones said, this kind of new sociability. Clay was very unsettled by this and created panels of etchings in response. As Ms. 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 named 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, writes in the book “The Obama Portraits.”
Ms. 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.”
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