Toile de Jouy has always been about narrative, and Versailles gives it one worth telling: the French fables of La Fontaine, rendered as a menagerie of animals and birds moving through a wooded landscape of trees and follies. The creatures are doing the things the fables have them do, which means a wall of it can be read as well as looked at.
The technique is the classic one, finely engraved motifs printed over a plain ground, with tone built entirely from the density of the engraved line. There is no shading in the painterly sense. Everything is hatching, and the skill lies in how the weight of the line separates a tree from the sky behind it.
Toiles reward being used generously. A single wall of one always looks like a sample; four walls, a papered ceiling or a papered cupboard front is when the design starts to behave the way toile was intended to, as a lining for a room rather than a decoration in it. It suits a bedroom, a dressing room, a small dining room or a cloakroom, and it sits happily with plain checks, painted furniture and old rugs, where the fineness of the print gives the eye somewhere calm to go.
