For centuries paper was made exclusively from rags. Rag and bone men went door to door in towns and villages across Europe, collecting old and unwanted fabrics and taking them to paper mills to be made into handmade papers. The cleanest rags would be made into expensive white papers, while coarse and dirty textiles and ropes were made into cheaper brown papers.
In the fourteenth century, Venice emerged as an international merchant city with a flourishing fabric dyeing industry. As a result the rag trade began to provide coloured rags to the paper mills in significant quantities. The first recorded mention of blue paper is in northern Italy in 1389, and these new blue papers quickly became very popular with artists and printers who were thrilled by the possibilities blue paper offered, allowing them to capture strong light and dark contrasts and atmospheric phenomena in a new way. Many Venetian artists of this period left large bodies of work on blue papers including Vittore Carpaccio, Jacopo Tintoretto and Lorenzo Lotto.
The fame and desirability of these papers spread throughout Europe and before long the use of blue paper was common among artists. JMW Turner used coloured papers extensively, often using blue papers to capture nocturnal scenes, landscapes and figure studies (pictured top). The Dutch painter Pieter Saenredam, celebrated for his beautiful studies of the way light plays across the complex planes of church interiors, uses blue paper to great effect in his drawing of 1634 (pictured above) using it to capture the cool dark recesses of the great vaulted ceiling of Sint Bavokirk in Haarlem.
By the 19th Century, with the industrialisation of paper production, there were no longer enough rags being produced to feed the newly invented Fourdriner paper machines hunger for pulp, and new chemistry allowed for wood pulp to be used as a paper making fibre for the first time. While this allowed for an explosion in the amount of paper being produced, the quality and variety of the papers available inevitably suffered. In 1800, before industrial paper production had taken hold, J Whatman, the most famous name British paper making though now long closed, were making over 280 different types of paper, each with their own particular characteristics and uses. This kind of variety is inconceivable today and all paper related arts, crafts and industries are poorer as a result.
In late summer of last year we decided we would start to make our own range of blue rag papers (that quickly grew into a much larger range of coloured rag papers!) in an attempt to arrest the seemingly endless slide towards homogeneity and blandness, and create papers of quality and character!
These papers would, we hope, be recognisable to the artists of former centuries as comparable in quality and appearance to what they would have been using. The colour of our rag papers are derived directly from the colour of the rags they are made from, without the addition of any dyes. Though appearing blue from a distance, upon closer inspection it can be seen that the papers are made up from a mixture of blue and white fibres. Though appearing a uniform blue from a distance, if you look more closely it is evident that the papers are made up from a melange of seperate blue and white fibres, giving them a depth and subtlety that is unmatched in papers made with chemical dyes.
One of the challenges has been sourcing a consistent supply of high-quality colored rags. Even finding textiles made purely from cotton and linen, uncontaminated by polyester or nylon, proved challenging. We have partnered with Thomas Ferguson & Co., one of Ireland’s oldest linen mills, and Community Clothing, a sustainable fashion brand, who kindly provide us with the waste from their production. These two partnerships allow us a wide range of high quality textile waste in a beautiful range of colours that we can make into our coloured papers.
We are very pleased with this new range of papers and we hope it brings you as much joy to use as it has given us satisfaction to make. We would love to see anything you create with them! Please send pictures to info@paper.foundation.
Each of which is available as either a laid or a wove paper. Please explore the full range on our website, or better yet, purchase one of our new swatch books. The papers really need to be seen to be appreciated!