#a. racinet

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Japanese Decorative Art in Das Polychrome Ornament

Today we are featuring Japanese decorative styles from Das Polychrome Ornament, the German language edition of the second series of L’Ornement Polychrome by French illustrator Albert-Charles-Auguste Racinet (1825-1893), who was an engraver and artistic director at the Parisian publisher Firmin Didot et Cie. The first series of L’Ornement Polychrome was published in ten installments between 1869 and 1873, totaling 100 plates of decorative arts from all over the world, from antiquity through the eighteen century. The second series of 120 plates was published from 1885 to 1887, and it included designs from the nineteenth century. The decorative plates from both series were inspired by various mediums, including textiles, painting, pottery, woodwork, metalwork, and architecture from many different cultures. Das Polychrome Ornament was published in Stuttgart in 1885, and it includes explanatory text in German by Carl Vogel, a professor and architect.

View more posts about decorative arts and pattern books.

–Sarah, Special Collections Graduate Intern 

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Persian art from Polychromatic Ornament

Today we are featuring chromolithographs of Persian decorative art from Polychromatic Ornament, the English edition of L’Ornement Polychrome by French illustrator Albert-Charles-Auguste Racinet (1825-1893). It was published in London by Henry Sotheran and Co. in 1877. It includes 100 plates produced by Firmin Didot of Paris, and an explanatory text translated from the original French.

A. Racinet writes in the introduction:

“If ornament may borrow from other arts their various characteristics – from architecture its general forms and the interest attaching to repetitions and variations of the same motive; from sculpture its real or imitated reliefs; from painting the charms of episodic subjects and of natural colouring – it may, without diverging from its proper sphere, fine inexhaustible resources.

From the simplest geometric figure – a square, a lozenge, or a triangle, the repetition and intermingling of which frequently suffice to form an interesting whole – to the most ingeniously complicated interlacings, the most capricious arabesques, and those chimerical compositions in which the line, the flower, the animal and the human figure are mixed and blended together, what a vast domain for the ornamentalist, who thus finds himself master of that fantastic and charming world, which depends not on nature but on imagination! What captivating and even seductive liberty, if such freely-ranging caprice were not be regulated by taste and judged by the effect produced, which must be, whatever the means employed, harmony in form as well as in colour!”

View more posts about decorative arts and pattern books.

–Sarah, Special Collections Graduate Assistant