Elegant botanical illustrations from the classic 1897 design book Plants and Their Application to Ornament arereproduced in this lavish collection. Sure to delight artists, designers, and fans of the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau styles, this gorgeous volume features flowering plants depicted as realistic natural history-style illustrations and stylized images demonstrating plant-based design motifs used on textiles, wallpapers, and more. Published in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this deluxe edition presents an important art history artifact, a useful design reference, and a lovely and ornamental objet d'art.

Compiled by a pioneer in Art Nouveau design, these 72 color plates of lush floral images are lovingly reproduced from a hard-to-find edition of a Belle Epoque classic. Full-page images, borders, and insets include illustrations — both real and fanciful — by M. P. Verneuil and other masters of the genre.

Lovely, stylized drawings of actual plants — done in the sensuous, curvilinear style of Art Nouveau and displayed in ready-to-use panels, frames, spot illustrations, and other configurations — are placed alongside naturalistic renderings of the same species. The side-by-side arrangements allow commercial artists, designers, and hobbyists a wide choice of realistic and fanciful images. 318 illustrations.

This text is a wide-ranging consideration of the cultural and symbolic significance of ornament, its rejection by modernism and its subsequent reinvention. Trilling explains how ornament works, why it has to be explained and why it matters.