Wyndham's Theatre in London is a small, highly ornamented house of decorative mouldings and gilding, garlands worked into every available surface, and the paper named after it takes that vocabulary and turns it into a floral damask. The structure is a damask's mirrored, repeating framework; the ornament filling it is theatrical plasterwork rather than a woven motif.
The drawing keeps the modelling of the original. Where a flat damask would give you an outline, this one gives you the shallow relief of a moulding, a highlight along the top of a scroll, a shadow where a leaf turns under, so the pattern has a sculptural quality on the wall. Several colourways use a metallic or a pearly mica ground, which reads as gilding does in a theatre: not brightly, but from the high points as the light moves.
Its natural rooms are the ones used after dark. A dining room, a drawing room, a principal bedroom or a stair lit by lamps and candles will show it at its best, since the design was drawn from a building made to be seen under exactly that kind of light. With plain silk or velvet, gilded frames and a good floor it makes a room feel finished; under flat daylight it settles down and behaves as a well-mannered damask.
