Zuber, and the woodblocks still printing after two centuries
The oldest surviving scenic-paper house in the world still prints from tens of thousands of hand-carved blocks. What that means for a mural you can commission today.
Zuber et Cie has printed decorative and scenic papers from its factory in Rixheim, in Alsace, since Jean Zuber took control of the works in 1802, and the firm traces its founding to 1797, which makes it the oldest wallpaper manufacturer still in operation. Its lasting fame rests on a technique almost no one else still practices at scale: printing panoramic scenes from carved wooden blocks, one color and one block at a time, entirely by hand.
The Zuber archive holds on the order of 150,000 pear-wood printing blocks, some cut in the early nineteenth century and classified as monuments historiques by the French state in 1983. A single panoramic scene can require thousands of separate block impressions across dozens of distinct distemper colors, each block registered precisely onto the last, which is why an authentic Zuber scenic is measured in months of labor rather than rolls off a press. Those blocks are the reason the house can still reprint a design first issued two hundred years ago.
The most celebrated of them is Vues de l'Amerique du Nord, designed by Jean-Julien Deltil and first printed in 1834, a romantic panorama of American landscapes and scenes. A set of it hangs in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, installed in 1961 during the Kennedy restoration, and it is the single fact most people know about scenic paper even if they have never heard the name Zuber. It is a useful anchor, because it tells you these murals were conceived as architecture-scale artworks, not as pattern.
For anyone commissioning a mural now, the Zuber tradition fixes the reference point for the whole category. A hand-blocked scenic is a made-to-order object with a long lead time, sold as a set of panels tuned to a wall, carrying the visible evidence of the hand in slight variations of ink and register. Evaluate any scenic or panoramic paper against that standard and its price and lead time stop looking arbitrary and start looking like what hand production costs.