Cole & Son | Cabaret

Cabaret is one of the more unexpected things in the Cole & Son archive. It is a narrative paper, with dancers turning, figures in costume and the whole apparatus of a carnival, drawn with the confidence of a poster rather than the restraint of a repeat. Papers with this much story in them were made in quantity a century ago and very few of them survive.

It is offered in a single colourway, which is the right decision. A design carrying this much incident needs its palette fixed by the drawing rather than reinterpreted, and the one arrangement it comes in is the one it was conceived in. There is no quiet version, and there should not be.

The match is a half drop with a 76.2 cm repeat on a wide 0.69 m roll, which distributes the figures across the wall and stops the dancers forming ranks. It belongs in a room used at night and used with company: a dining room, a bar, a games room, a cloakroom where guests will come upon it unexpectedly. Everything else in the room should be plain, because this design does not share. Papers like this were once ordinary; almost none of them are still made.