FLORIATED ORNAMENT |
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PUGIN, A. Welby. FLORIATED ORNAMENT.
London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849. Folio. Original publisher's red half-morocco, decorated cloth boards. (viii) pages, 31 chromolithographic plates. First edition.
One of Pugin's last and finest published works. In Floriated Ornaments, Pugin offers a series of Gothic ornaments inspired from models found in nature. This is Pugin at his best. Floriated Ornament directly influenced Dresser and through him art nouveau ornamentation. Pugin's own inspiration was Jacobus Theodorus's Eicones Plantarum (1590). "Pugin managed at last to write the text for the book on 'vegetable and floral ornament' that he had begun four years earlier. It was finished on Michaelmas day, 29 September [1849]. ... It is a beautiful book, now rare, having been used to destruction in drawing offices, a styalized English flora. Each plate shows five designs arranged in a quincunx within a gold border, the individual patterns symmetrical round one or two axes. The common plants of field and garden, primrose, ivy, thistle and wild geranium, are transformed into crystalline shapes, 'principally intended for stencilling.'" This copy belonged to the Rt. Rev. Hugh Singleton, fifth Bishop of Shrewsbury with his ownership label on front paste-down. Recased, spine lettered in gilt, covers with gilt stamped ornaments.
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