Bamboo records a moment in British taste. The Victorian enthusiasm for the Orientalist style put the plant onto everything from furniture to tiles, and this screen-printed version belongs to that fashion, though the drawing is better than most, with the culms properly jointed and the leaves given their correct narrow taper.
The design is essentially vertical. Canes rise the full height of the repeat with the leaves clustering at the nodes, so the wall gains a strong upright grain and, with it, apparent height. Because the stems are open and the leaves sparse, a good deal of ground shows through, and the paper never becomes dense the way most foliage designs do at this scale.
It hangs on a straight match with a 76 cm repeat on a 0.52 m roll, which keeps the canes aligned across widths and preserves the vertical continuity, the one thing this design cannot afford to lose. Use it where lift is wanted: a low-ceilinged bedroom, a passage, a small bathroom, a garden room. It sits well with rattan, lacquer and plain matting, and it is better through a whole room than on one wall. Hung throughout a small room, it makes the ceiling look considerably further away than it is.
