Victorian Patterns and Designs in Full Color

G. A. and M. A. Audsley

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780486257563
• eBook ISBN: 9780486155456
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Decorative Arts

The Practical Decorator and Ornamentist was the last and one of the most important of the great chromolithographic collections of decorative ornament produced in the Victorian era. Created by two noted British architects and published in 1892, it presents a magnificent array of finely drawn patterns and designs in full color.
The designs are primarily flat ornament ideal for the purposes of interior design, and were directed to architects, painters, decorators, and designers of the period for use in their commissions. This beautiful book brings back into print all 100 of the original plates. Every effort has been made to duplicate the splendid achievement of the original.
The royalty-free patterns and motifs span a wide spectrum of ornamental styles: Greek and Neo-Greco moldings, panel decorations, corner ornaments, friezes and pilaster designs; medieval roof or ceiling ornamentation, "masonry" and "brick" patterns, fabric designs and decorations for rafters and beams; Renaissance coffer or panel ornamentation, rosettes, and diaper patterns; Japanese fret bands or borders, characteristic powderings of medallions, flowers and leaves, and Imperial crests; conventional floral ornament, including studies of the rose, patera or panel ornaments, and crestings of conventionalized flowers; and a miscellaneous grouping of bands, borders, powderings, centerpieces, pillars, finials, and more. All were drawn and painted with the supple flourish and superb attention to detail for which the Victorians were famous.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

BOOK PRINTING enjoyed tremendous technical advances during the nineteenth century. In particular, the full-color illustrated book benefited from the development of chromolithography, which allowed works to be printed in brilliant color entirely by mechanical methods. Previously, works in full color (as distinguished from those with decorative initials in red or blue) were produced by laborious hand tinting.

Aloys Senefelder had discovered the process of lithography at the close of the eighteenth century. Its application to color printing (for which the problem of registration had to be overcome) was quickly appreciated, and the first print using this method was executed in 1818. But it was Details and Ornaments from the Alhambra by Owen Jones, published in parts between 1836 and 1845, that established the credentials of chromolithography (a term first used in 1837).

In 1836, Henry Shaw’s The Encyclopedia of Ornament, one of the earliest of the great Victorian anthologies of ornament (with hand-tinted illustrations), began part publication. It was published in book form in 1842. Such books were quick to avail themselves of the technique of chromolithography. In 1856, Day & Son published what is generally recognized as the masterpiece of the genre, Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament. By offering color reproductions of thousands of designs (most of them flat ornament) Jones hoped to instruct and rectify contemporary taste through the study of natural forms and how they had been stylized by various civilizations. (All 100 plates have been reprinted by Dover Publications; ISBN 0-486-25463-1.)

Many similar works followed, although, by the end of the 1860s, other methods of reproduction were offering competition damaging to chromolithography. The Practic...

Table of contents

• DOVER PICTORIAL ARCHIVE SERIES
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PUBLISHER’S NOTE