Antique Sage Green Tin Canister, Chromolitho Scrap, c. 1900–1935

The Piece

A cylindrical tinplate canister, painted overall in a soft sage green and decorated round the body with applied floral groups under a sealing varnish.

The form is a plain straight sided can with a rolled bead at the rim, a lapped vertical side seam running the full height of the body, and a separate base disc crimped in at the bottom. Nothing has been added to the shape. The whole of the decoration is on the surface.

Three floral groups are set around the body at intervals. The first is a full mixed bouquet in scarlet, white and yellow with blue cornflowers and trailing green. The second is a cluster of pale lilac and white daisies with a small butterfly. The third is a bolder spray of orange and gold sunflowers with two butterflies worked into it.

The applied papers stand up off the surface in relief. Each flower, leaf and butterfly is cut around its own outline, so the edges of the petals and the wings are the edges of the paper, and the whole group sits proud enough to catch the light along one side.

The green ground is laid on by hand with the brush marks left showing, and it is worn through to bare metal at the rim and around the base where the piece has been set down and picked up for a very long time. The interior is unpainted, with the bare tinned surface gone to an even deep bloom of oxidation.

History & Provenance

The decoration is the evidence, and it is better than it first appears.

Look at how the florals are printed. The colour is laid in flat, solid areas with hard edges and a fine drawn black keyline running round every form, and there is no halftone dot screen anywhere in them. The poppy is a flat orange red with a flat lighter highlight and a ring of drawn black dots at the centre. The cornflower is flat blue against flat white. The butterfly is a set of flat colour fields inside a black outline. That is chromolithography, printed from a separate stone or plate for each colour. Offset halftone, which replaced it, leaves a rosette of dots under magnification and there is none here.

Then look at how they are cut. Every piece is die cut to its own outline, right down to the spiky petals of the cornflower and the shape of a butterfly wing, and every piece is embossed so that it stands in low relief. That is scrap, the die cut embossed chromolithographic sheets produced in enormous quantity for the album and decorating trade, largely in Germany. Scrap of this kind was made from around the 1870s, peaked before the First World War, and had effectively ceased by the Second. Postwar revivals are offset printed, flatter and far less finely cut.

The method of application matters too. Mid century decoupage builds varnish up in many coats until the paper edge is buried and the surface feels flush, which is the whole point of the technique as it was taught. Here the paper edges stand proud and the relief is intact, which means the scrap was laid with a thin size in the older manner rather than sunk under a modern finish. The varnish over it has crazed into a fine net, visible across the white chrysanthemum, and that is the behaviour of a spirit varnish with age. A modern polyurethane yellows but does not craze this way.

The can agrees with all of it. A lapped vertical side seam, a rolled rim bead and a separately crimped base disc are early tinplate construction, and the interior has oxidised evenly right through rather than in patches, which takes decades in a dry store.

A correction is owed. This was first catalogued at c. 1955 to 1980 as mid century American home craft, on the assumption that any paper floral under varnish on a tin was decoupage of that period. That was wrong twice over. The printing is chromolithographic with no halftone screen, which the mid century cannot produce, and the paper stands in embossed relief rather than being buried under built up varnish, which is the opposite of how mid century decoupage was done. The date has been moved back accordingly.

No maker's mark, label or printed brand survives, which is expected given that any original can printing is under the paint. That absence gives an outer limit rather than a starting point.

Pieces like this were made to be used, not shown. That is why they wear the way they do, and why one with the varnish still holding and no paper lifted is worth pausing over.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Sage green with scarlet, gold and lilac is a harder colour story than it sounds, and this one works because the green is muted and slightly dirty rather than fresh. It will sit against pine, oak, painted brick and old plaster without arguing with any of them.

Use it. Wooden spoons and whisks by a stove, secateurs and twine on a potting bench, brushes on a desk, or dried stems and seed heads on a kitchen shelf. It is exactly the right height to keep a utensil crock from disappearing behind a hob.

The detail that repays a close look is the scrap. Those flowers were printed from a stone, one colour at a time, embossed and die cut around every petal by a German works that has been gone for the better part of a century, and somebody cut them off a sheet and laid them on a tin because it made a plain thing worth keeping. You cannot buy that paper any more, at any price.

The wear is the reason to buy it rather than a reason to hesitate. The rubbed rim and the thin base are where somebody's hands went for decades, and that is the thing a reproduction can never supply.