The painted white room was born out of an episode of introversion, in an act of creative defiance. On a night in London, a British interior designer and architect named Edward William Godwin holed up in his room to ponder the purpose of beauty. He was a sensitive person, one who was often overwhelmed by how he perceived the world. Recently he had marveled at the elegance of Chinese and Japanese porcelain, which was newly available in the shops. This porcelain often featured rich blue patterns drawn against a white background.
After a long night in the privacy of his room, Godwin impulsively painted over the wallpaper that covered the ceiling with a creamy white paint. His gesture earned praise from his bohemian cohort, which included the playwright Oscar Wilde and fellow designers William Morris and Philip Webb, who appreciated the dramatic look of his new ceiling upon visiting with him. A few years later in the Cotswolds, Morris and Webb got caught up in their own pursuit of beauty, and following Godwin’s example, they whitewashed an entire room of Morris’s country retreat. They named this space “the Paneled Room” at first, but in time, it became known as the White Room. They fashioned the interior as a bit of a dreamscape and laboratory of design, one that aimed to be dislocated from any specifics of history or geography.
There was elegance in the white room’s plainness, and it could be embraced by everyone without drawing attention to stark lines of class.
Morris was a wild-haired and bearded optimist with gentle eyes. Originally a poet, he was born in Walthamstow, and he spent his early career in London. He wrote a science fiction novel about the possibility of finding a utopia hundreds of years in the future, which was published in 1890. He believed in an egalitarian society, and his idealism made him especially attentive to the environments in which people lived, as he believed that surrounding oneself with pleasing colors and images could help people feel more connected to the natural world. Morris is possibly best remembered today for his formative contributions to the Arts and Crafts Movement, in which he designed textile and wallpaper patterns with elaborate tangles of flora and fauna, punctuated with images of songbirds or ripened fruit.
Morris’s wallpaper patterns were rich in color and brought the world out-of-doors inside. They were not affordable for all, certainly not by the poorest of persons, whose well-being motivated him. But white paint could be used by anyone. While it would not be an antidote to poverty, a white room could make it look as though its painter had found one. Morris described two ways to live as points for comparison:
Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement: a sanded floor and whitewashed walls, and the green trees, and flowery meads, and living waters outside; or a grimy palace amid the smoke with a regiment of housemaids always working to smear the dirt together so that it may be unnoticed; which, think you, is the most refined, the most fit for a gentleman of those two dwellings?
Trees and waterways were a lovely idea, but at the time, nearly two-thirds of the population of the UK lived in crowded, sooty cities. There was elegance in the white room’s plainness, and it could be embraced by everyone without drawing attention to stark lines of class.
Decorators in the U.S. thought the idea of painting a room white was absurd. An article published in the monthly magazine The Decorator and Furnisher noted that the white room was such a fanciful idea, one so out of place with the style of the time, that should it manifest, it would completely transform men’s fashion, which was intentionally drab and designed to look good in wood-paneled rooms. Still, the writer speculated on the possibility of a white room wistfully: “Few householders have had courage to allow a white room to be set apart in their domiciles, yet white gives a sense of cleanliness, of spaciousness and of refinement that would be a startling and welcome novelty.”
A decade later in Vienna, Adolf Loos, an Austrian and Czechoslovak architect and designer, lover of white paint, and a bombastic purveyor of aesthetic purism, designed a white room for his nineteen-year-old bride, Lina, within his apartment. The bridal bedchamber featured a white angora carpet and sheer white draperies that hung around the walls. Despite the luxurious textures, the diaphanous space had the air of a compartment. Loos, who was thirty-one, was known to express displeasure in hot and angry bursts and could be unpredictable. His white room represented his meticulous palette and, quite possibly, a desire for control over Lina, who inhabited it. Their marriage lasted for only three years.
But the white room was an idea that would continue to develop. White paint was increasingly affordable, and any abode could be transformed by it. Paint manufacturers recognized the opportunity for increased sales and advertised it in popular magazines. The National Lead Company began to build a consumer culture around the idea of home improvement. Its subtext was a curious alignment between decoration and racial anxiety. A full-page ad in an issue of the American Paint and Oil Dealer encouraged purveyors to adopt white paint as the industry standard for home improvement, including the use of white-lead paints. The ad imagined a conversation between a painter and potential client, offering a script for the pitch:
I am a white-leader, said the painter.
What’s a white-leader? asked the property owner.
A white-leader, replied the painter, is first of all a man who believes in and uses pure white lead as a paint pigment. A painter who uses white lead, a dealer who pushes white lead, a property owner who specifies white lead shall be used on his building—they are all entitled to be called white-leaders.
Why, I am a white-leader then, said the property owner.
The ad’s postscript read: “Be a white-leader and all that goes with it.” What did that imply? There’s a visual connection between these words “lead” and “leader,” even if their meanings and pronunciation differ. “Lead” refers to the chemical element, while “lead” denotes the prima position of charismatic power. But it’s intriguing to think of them as overlapping in this context. In the ad, one who paints with white-lead becomes a “white-leader.”
It reminded consumers that the power to transform one’s life could be as easily accessed as a brush and bucket of white paint.
Without the hyphen, the spelling mirrors the phrase “white leader,” which was casually dispatched in the era of Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, and other violence. The Great Migration of Black people from Southern rural communities to Northern cities was just beginning. A few other strong words stick out in this ad: pure, pushes, entitled. These words often appeared in the parlance of racial grievance. At best, the invitation to become a white-leader draws an oblique link between white paint and the discourse of racial discrimination. At worst, it affirms that white paint signals one’s affinity with practices of racial exclusion.
On the consumer front, the National Lead Company developed an even more popular advertising campaign. In 1907, they created the Dutch Boy brand of paints that featured a nine-year-old towheaded boy holding a brush and a bucket as mascot. The little Dutch Boy, with his cherubic features, personified innocence and wholesomeness. This also was a bit of misrepresentation. Dutch Boy paints were named for a corrosive method of making white-lead paint. The “Dutch process” involved filling clay pots with metallic strips in vinegar. The pots were stacked on trays atop layers of horse manure. In time, the elements caused the metal to transform into a bright white-lead carbonate, which could be ground into a powder and mixed with oils and resin to make paint.
Even in that era, lead paint was known to be harmful, but it was also extremely effective in covering a surface with a smooth and even finish. The little Dutch Boy signaled to consumers that anyone could use this paint, even a child! A 1907 advertisement courting amateur painters boasted: “Look for the Dutch Boy Painter on the side of the keg. He guarantees that the words ‘White Lead’ on the head of the keg mean Pure White Lead.” The nod to purity emphasized the paint brand’s relationship to cleanliness and virtue, and possibly other notions of bigotry.
The Dutch Boy brand grew so popular with homeowners that the company published a poetic picture-book brochure near the end of World War I to celebrate the benefits of its paints. It featured the cheery youngster’s arrival in “the Land of Sad Houses” with his paintbrush and bucket. A short poem accompanies each illustration. In this one, an older house begs for a restorative coat of paint:
And through the front door opened wide
He painted purest white inside.
“Hurrah!” The old house cried; “’Tis true, Dutch Boy White Lead has made me new!”
As the devastating consequences of the war and its aftermath became clearer, the Dutch Boy brand promoted house painting as a means of rebirth and renewal. It reminded consumers that the power to transform one’s life could be as easily accessed as a brush and bucket of white paint.
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Excerpted from A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint by Wendy S. Walters. Copyright © 2026 by Wendy S. Walters. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.