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William Morris: Why a 140-Year-Old Wallpaper Still Looks Modern
William Morris hated most of what the Victorian factory could produce and spent his life proving it could be done better by hand. He was a poet, a socialist, a printer, and a businessman, and the thing he is remembered for is wallpaper. That is not an insult. The patterns he drew between 1862 and 1896 are still in production, still copied, and still look right in rooms that have nothing else Victorian in them. How a Morris pattern is built Morris designed for repeat. Every pattern is a single... Read more...
Alphonse Mucha and the Poster That Made Paris Stop
In the last week of 1894, a Czech illustrator named Alphonse Mucha was the only artist left in a Paris print shop over the Christmas holiday when a rush order came in: the actress Sarah Bernhardt needed a poster for her play Gismonda by New Year's Day. Mucha drew a life-size Bernhardt in Byzantine robes on a tall, narrow sheet in muted golds and greens. When the posters went up in the first days of 1895, Parisians cut them off the hoardings to take home. Bernhardt signed him to a... Read more...
How to Frame a Vintage Botanical Print
Botanical prints are the easiest art to hang badly. They are delicate, usually vertical, and often have a lot of white paper. Frame one wrong and it looks like a page torn from a catalogue. Frame it right and it looks like it came out of a country house. The difference is almost entirely mat and proportion. Start with the mat, not the frame A mat is the border of card between the print and the frame. For botanical prints it does two things: it keeps the paper off the... Read more...
Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, Explained
Ask most people to picture Japanese art and they will picture a wave. Under the Wave off Kanagawa — the "Great Wave" — is one of the most reproduced images on earth. Fewer people know that it is a single print from a series, and that the series is one of the great achievements of any printmaker anywhere. A mountain in forty-six views Katsushika Hokusai was around seventy when the publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi issued Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji between about 1830 and 1832. The series sold so well that... Read more...
How to Frame a Vintage Art Print: Sizes, Mats, and Glass
A good print in a bad frame looks like a poster. The same print in the right frame looks like it came off a museum wall. Here is the short, practical version of what matters.1. Pick the size for the wall, not the printArt should fill roughly two-thirds of the width of the furniture beneath it. Over a sofa (about 84 inches), that means a 24×36 or a pair of 16×24s. Over a desk or console, a 16×24 or 12×18. In a hallway or bathroom, 12×18 is plenty. All of... Read more...
Redouté’s Les Roses: The Story Behind the Most Famous Flower Book Ever Printed
Pierre-Joseph Redouté painted flowers for Marie Antoinette, survived the Revolution, and then painted them for Empress Joséphine, who was building the greatest rose garden in Europe at Malmaison. Between 1817 and 1824 he published Les Roses: 169 plates, stipple-engraved and finished by hand, documenting nearly every rose known in France. Two centuries later it is still the flower book every other one is measured against.Why these plates look the way they doRedouté worked in stipple engraving — thousands of tiny dots rather than lines — printed in color à la... Read more...
Which Hokusai Print Should You Buy? A Guide to Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji
Between about 1830 and 1832, Katsushika Hokusai — already in his seventies — published a series of woodblock prints that changed how the world sees Japan. Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei) shows the sacred mountain from farmers’ fields, fishing boats, temple roofs, and city streets. The Great Wave is the famous one. The rest of the series is, if anything, better.Why the series mattersHokusai was the first Japanese printmaker to build an entire series around a landscape rather than actors or courtesans. He also used a new imported... Read more...