William Mulready (April 1, 1786 - July 7, 1863) was an Irish genre painter
living in London. He is best
known for his romanticizing depictions of rural scenes.
William
Mulready was born in Ennis, County Clare. Early
in his life, in 1792, the family
moved to London, where he was able to get an education and was taught painting
well enough so that he was accepted at the Royal Academy School at the age of
fourteen.
Mulready stationery describes pre-gummed wrappers or envelopes,
introduced as part of the British Post Office postal reforms of 1840. Pregummed envelopes as we know them
today did not exist. The name Mulready arises from the fact that W.A.
Mulready, a well-known artist of the time, was commissioned to
illustrate part of a precut diamond-shaped sheet which, when the sides were
folded about a central rectangular area, became an envelope when the
overlapping edges were pasted.(The diamond-shaped sheet and the geometrically
more complex short-arm cross-shaped sheet remain essentially the staple designs
to this day.)
The Mulready illustration was printed on the sheet such that it appeared on
the face of the envelope. (As a point of interest: all mechanical printing devices
from the Gutenberg
press on are primarily designed to process flat rectangular sheets.
Hence the illustration would have been printed using a press and then cut to a
diamond shape.The number produced from any one sheet naturally depended on the
size of the printing bed and to this day envelope printing and envelope
manufacture have maintained a symbiotic relationship.)
In a sense the Mulready illustration was a very elaborate frank indicating
that postage had been paid.
There was nothing to stop one from writing on the inside; consequently the
Mulready wrapper was fundamentally akin to the present-day aerogramme.
However, the Mulready envelope suffered an inglorious demise. The design
showed a munificent Britannia
bestowing the benefits of postal services to the countries of the world under
British control. The design was so much over the top that it generated
widespread ridicule and lampooning, and in addition it was perceived in some
areas as a covert government attempt to control the supply of envelopes, and
hence control the flow of information carried by the postal service (which had
become solely a government monopoly under the reforms). As a result of the
uproar the wrappers were withdrawn and a machine was designed and built to
destroy the stocks.