A deeper dive into the Art of Decoupage

In eighteenth-century Venice, the most coveted objects in any grand room were lacquered: cabinets, trays and screens finished in the deep, glassy style arriving from China and Japan. True lacquer was slow, imported and ruinously expensive, so Venetian furniture makers invented a shortcut. They cut out printed engravings by hand, pasted them onto painted furniture and buried them under coat after coat of varnish until the surface read as one seamless, gleaming whole. They called it lacca povera — poor man's lacquer. The name was an apology; the work needed none. Three centuries on, the imitation is its own art, and the originals are in museums.

The craft took its lasting name from the French découper, to cut out, and cutting is the whole discipline. Anyone can paste a picture on a box. Decoupage proper is composition: choosing images, arranging them so they belong to each other and to the object, then sealing them under enough varnish that they stop sitting on the surface and start swimming inside it. Done properly you should want to run a thumb across the finish and feel nothing but gloss.

It keeps being rediscovered by serious people. In the 1770s Mary Delany, an Englishwoman of seventy-two, began cutting botanicals from hand-coloured paper with such precision that her "paper mosaicks" — nearly a thousand of them — now live in the British Museum and are still studied by botanists. Two centuries later Matisse, no longer able to stand at an easel, took scissors to painted paper and called it drawing with scissors. A craft invented to fake something has a habit of attracting people who refuse to fake anything.

Which brings us to Sussex. Arundel Eccentrics work the old way: images cut by hand, composed onto black tole buckets, boxes and chests — processions of elephants, leopards, butterflies and shoals of fish in warm gold — then sealed under varnish until each piece carries that lacquered depth the Venetians were chasing all along. Liberty of London came calling, which tells you something about how far poor man's lacquer has travelled.

Every piece is one of one, because it has to be: no two compositions of hand-cut images can repeat. Browse what's currently in from the Arundel decoupage collection — and if a favourite has gone, that's the nature of a craft where nothing is printed twice.