Traditional Floral Designs and Motifs for Artists and Craftspeople

Madeleine Orban-Szontagh

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780486139760
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Decorative Arts

Re-create a lovely spray of wild roses that once bloomed in abundance on an early nineteenth-century fabric. Duplicate a lush Persian floral print from a kerchief worn in the waning days of the acien régime. These and dozens of other superb royalty-free designs — adapted from patterns on antique textiles — are available now to artists and craftspeople in this attractive collection.
A noted artist and surface designer has masterfully rendered nearly 230 designs from French, English, German, Swiss, and Russian textiles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Featured are profusions of flowers, leaves, sprays, branches, fruits, and birds in a wide variety of formats: clusters, bouquets, single vignettes, and more. Also shown are several full-page motifs with a single large, elaborate flower. Captions supply a brief description, date, and place of origin for the designs on each page.
Among the many charming samples are floral and butterfly blockprints from Alsace in France (c. 1790), a Kashmir floral motif from England (1805), an English rose bouquet (1834), berries and flowers from Switzerland (1820), and scores of others.

Introduction

THE PERIOD BETWEEN THE mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries was a highly innovative one for textile manufacture in Europe, producing with a high degree of technical perfection a great variety of designs that are now firmly fixed in our tradition. During this relatively short period, several new inventions appeared in the industry, the most important of which included copperplate printing and roller printing in Scotland, the Leitenberger blockprinting machine in Germany and the Jacquard loom in France. With the aid of these developments, European manufacturers in the mid-eighteenth century began not only to maximize the quality and beauty of domestic designs produced in hand blockprints, embroidery and brocade, but also to incorporate Eastern-style prints and weaves into their repertoires and actually compete with the East in the same field of endeavor.

In France, England, Germany and Switzerland, designs of this period were dominated by stripes, flowers, fruit, ribbons, birds and branches. Many of them resembled designs centuries old that had originated in the East—especially India, Persia and China—and had already begun to influence Europe in the Middle Ages. Floral designs like those in ancient Persian textiles, which had influenced Byzantine and then medieval Italian fabr...

Table of contents

• DOVER PICTORIAL ARCHIVE SERIES
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction