Art Nouveau Floral Patterns and Stencil Designs in Full Color (Dover Pictorial Archive)

Dover Publications is the friend of anyone with nearly any sort of interest (and not much money). If you're interested in the ways and means of New Art, get this one.M. Verneuil clearly would have liked the Dover editors. LIke them, he had his wide-ranging interests, in his case in botany, Japanese design, and decorative arts (to judge by his booklist).This book is a feast that shifts back and forth from stylization and abstraction on one hand to close observation of natural plant forms on the other. One two-page spread (plates 62 & 63) in particular juxtaposes both this reduction into pattern and the accuracy of his eye.These are the crown imperial and the German iris from Verneuil's Etude de la plante. Side views of each plant give you the random visual complexity of the original -- almost scruffy leaves, in the crown imperial's case. Both set forth the visually overwhelming detail of the blossoms. But, at the bottom of both plates are plan views of a blossom, simple, regular and compelling as a Japanese mon.If the rest of Verneuil's plant book is this good, I'm hoping Dover reprints the whole thing one day.When Verneuil moves to greater depths (or is it heights?) of abstraction, the results are often stunning. Don't miss plate 27, an overall pattern of maidenhair fern in shades of orange, or plate 28, a tiled pattern of wild iris in rippling water.It's interesting to compare the sunflowers in plate 79, apparently a detail from a running line of tiles, with the one in plate 59 from Etude de la plante. The latter captures the petals in wild abandon, the leaves in their rough, almost papery reality. The former flattens and regularizes each leaf, and views the flowers head-on, giving us a literal sunburst of shape and color in complex but regular pattern.Throughout, M. Verneuil brings a solid color sense, now playing with shades of neighboring hues, now with contrasting hues. Each one seems absolutely right.You can't open this book to any page without feeling that the mind and eye that originated it were pretty special. It's more than likely that some of this impression is due to the care of Carol Belanger Grafton, who selected and arranged the plates -- many of the two-page spreads seem to delight in comparing, or mirroring, or contrasting Verneuil's designs.If you like art nouveau, you'll want this book.

Not what I expected. It consists of pictures, not stencils.

After reading the main review above, I decided I would buy the book anyway, and much to my surprise, I found ALL of the cover illustrations inside the book. But, had I not, I had intended to simply scan the cover to obtain the iris design that interested me. For those without a scanner, there is always tracing paper or projector or a camera. If you like it, and Dover says you can use it, what's a little extra time & effort?

For appreciative lovers of the Art Nouveau era, a particularly nice book. Illustrations are very clear and beautiful. Would like to see more pictures in color.

This book exceeded my hopes. It had many more images in full color than I expected for such a cheap book. I have seen other books by Verneuil and they were half as nice and mostly black and white. I think anyone into decorating, drawing, and painting will like this book. It will inspire you to create art nouveau lines and flowers on your own work.

Beautiful book - great color, paper, and the designs are fantastic. Love looking at it for inspiration for embroidery patterns.

I thought the artwork in this book was stunning, and the reproduction quality and colors were lovely. I did have one major problem with the book, two of the main designs on the cover (topmost horizontal design and the center horizontal design) are NOT IN THE BOOK! These are two of the main patterns I planned to use from the book, and now if I want to, I need to get them from the cover, where they are covered by text. I found this to be unacceptable! Please keep this fact in mind if the cover is what won you over.

Some I really loved, most were just ok. Worth having however.