Hummingbirds began as a hand-blocked paper in the eighteenth century and has been in the Cole & Son archive ever since. The design is a trailing floral with birds through it, small and precisely drawn, caught mid-hover among the flowers rather than perched decoratively on them. Nothing in the composition is symmetrical, which is what gives a two-hundred-year-old paper its liveliness.
Its longevity comes from the balance of the drawing. The floral trail is fine and open, so the ground is never crowded; the birds are small enough to be discovered rather than declared, and they are distributed unevenly, which is what stops the eye from finding the repeat. At 53.3 cm the repeat is modest for a design of this complexity, and the half-drop match staggers the trails so the pattern climbs diagonally. On a 0.52 m roll it is straightforward to hang in ordinary rooms.
Two centuries of use have not found it out, and it still behaves best where it was first intended: bedrooms, dressing rooms, small drawing rooms and halls. Some colourways sit on a mica ground and lift under lamplight, others are wholly matt and read flatter and more archival. Either way it takes pictures and mirrors without complaint.
