Design & Ornament

Antique Design and Ornament Prints — Decorative Pattern and Applied Art

This category brings together original antique design and ornament prints, encompassing the great tradition of decorative pattern publication that shaped the applied arts of Europe from the Renaissance through to the 19th century. These works — produced for use by craftsmen, architects, designers and artists as sources of ornamental motifs and compositional models — represent the documented vocabulary of European decorative art at its most systematic, preserving the visual language through which designers communicated ideas across national boundaries and craft traditions for four centuries.

The decorative pattern book is one of the foundational publishing genres of European graphic art. From the earliest printed pattern books of the 16th century — which disseminated the ornamental vocabulary of the Italian Renaissance to craftsmen across Europe — through to the comprehensive design encyclopaedias of the 19th century, pattern publications translated the latest developments in ornamental art into printed form accessible to the broadest possible audience of practitioners. The great names of European ornamental design — Jean Berain, Daniel Marot, Jacques de Lajoue, Thomas Chippendale, Robert Adam, Owen Jones and their contemporaries — published their designs in engravings that defined the decorative language of entire generations of craftsmen and their clients.

Grotesque ornament — the curvilinear decorative vocabulary derived from the wall paintings of ancient Rome and developed by Italian Renaissance artists into a system of fantastic ornament combining human figures, animals, foliage and architectural elements — was among the most productive and widely disseminated subjects of early modern ornamental engraving. Publications by Raphael’s followers and by the northern European engravers who adapted the Italian grotesque tradition to local tastes produced a body of ornamental imagery that influenced European decorative art for two centuries.

Rococo ornament — the asymmetric, naturalistic decorative style that dominated European applied art from the 1720s through the 1760s — generated an extraordinary body of ornamental engraving, as the pattern books of French, German and English designers disseminated the new style to craftsmen working in furniture, silver, textiles, ceramics and every other medium of decorative production. These rococo ornament prints, with their characteristic shells, asymmetric cartouches, naturalistic foliage and playful figurative elements, remain among the most visually compelling examples of the decorative engraving tradition.

Antique design and ornament prints are collected by historians of the decorative arts, practising designers who draw on historical sources, and collectors drawn by the visual beauty of works produced at the intersection of art, craft and the applied sciences of design.