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Descriptive term applied to a style of decorative arts that was widely disseminated in Europe and the USA during the 1920s and 1930s. Derived from the style made popular by the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925, the term has been used only since the late 1960s, when there was a revival of interest in the decorative arts of the early 20th century. Since then the term ‘Art Deco’ has been applied to a wide variety of works produced during the inter-war years, and even to those of the German Bauhaus. But Art Deco was essentially of French origin, and the term should, therefore, be applied only to French works and those from countries directly influenced by France.

The development of the Art Deco style, or the Style moderne as it was called at the time, closely paralleled the initiation of the 1925...

[Fr.: ‘new art’]

Decorative style of the late 19th century and the early 20th that flourished principally in Europe and the USA. Although it influenced painting and sculpture, its chief manifestations were in architecture and the decorative and graphic arts, the aspects on which this survey concentrates. It is characterized by sinuous, asymmetrical lines based on organic forms; in a broader sense it encompasses the geometrical and more abstract patterns and rhythms that were evolved as part of the general reaction to 19th-century historicism. There are wide variations in the style according to where it appeared and the materials that were employed.

Art Nouveau has been held to have had its beginnings in 1894 or 1895. A more appropriate date would be 1884, the year the progressive group Les XX was founded in Belgium, and the term was used in the periodical that supported it, Art Moderne: ‘we are believers in Art Nouveau’. The origin of the name is usually attributed to ...

Informal movement in architecture and the decorative arts that championed the unity of the arts, the experience of the individual craftsman, and the qualities of materials and construction in the work itself.

The Arts and Crafts Movement developed in the second half of the 19th century and lasted well into the 20th, drawing its support from progressive artists, architects and designers, philanthropists, amateurs, and middle-class women seeking work in the home. They set up small workshops apart from the world of industry, revived old techniques, and revered the humble household objects of pre-industrial times. The movement was strongest in the industrializing countries of northern Europe and in the USA, and it can best be understood as an unfocused reaction against industrialization. Although quixotic in its anti-industrialism, it was not unique; indeed it was only one among several late 19th-century reform movements, such as the Garden City movement, vegetarianism, and folksong revivals, that set the Romantic values of nature and folk culture against the artificiality of modern life....

English family of glassware enamellers. In 1760 William Beilby (1705–65), a goldsmith, moved his family from Durham to Newcastle upon Tyne, where his son Ralph Beilby (1743–1817) worked as a heraldic engraver. In 1755 William Beilby jr (1740–1819) was apprenticed to the Birmingham enameller John Haseldine. He was then employed with his sister Mary Beilby (1749–97) at the Dagnia-Williams glasshouse in Newcastle upon Tyne, where they decorated drinking glasses called ‘light balusters’ or ‘Newcastle’ glasses and decanters. Their early work is thought to have been influenced by the heraldic work of their brother Ralph: the decoration includes the royal coat of arms of George III and the Prince of Wales’s feathers, painted in full heraldic colours on enamel-twist goblets. Their work then became more Rococo in style, displaying rustic scenes, such architectural fantasies as classical buildings and ruins, baskets of fruit, floral subjects, fruiting vines, exotic birds, gardens and landscapes, using only white enamelling. Designs often incorporated standard vine scroll and hop-and-barley motifs. They used white, monochrome or a combination of enamel colours, and some glasses have gilded rims. Their glasses are often signed with only the surname. Before ...

Metal knob or boss used for decoration on a book or harness. The term can also denote a bull’s eye in glass and (in early modern English) trunk-hose that is puffed out at the top. It is also used to describe a heavy textile fringe in curtains, pelmets and the top covers of seat furniture....

[Fr. crible: ‘sieve’]

Type of engraving on metal or wood or glass; such engravings depict shade or half-tones through the use of small dots. Dotted prints (Fr. criblé; Ger. Schrotblatt) made by relief-engraving on metal were produced by goldsmiths in the second half of the 15th century in the Netherlands, parts of the Rhine, Cologne, Basle and Lake Constance....

(b ?Sárospatak, Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén, 1207; d Marburg, Nov 17, 1231; can May 27, 1235; fd 17 Nov).

Hungarian saint and patron. She was the daughter of the Árpád King Andrew II of Hungary (reg 1205–35) and Gertrude of Andechs-Meran (1185–1213) and married Ludwig IV, Landgrave of Thuringia (reg 1217–27) in 1221. After Ludwig’s death (11 September 1227) whilst on crusade, Elizabeth made vows of obedience and chastity in the Franciscan church in Eisenach and later moved to Marburg where she founded a hospital. She died on 17 November 1231 and was canonized on 27 May 1235. Her relics were preserved in the Marburg, Elisabethkirche (begun 1235, dedicated 1283) having been translated there on 1 May 1236 in the presence of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II.

Elizabeth’s cult was promoted through a number of royal houses with connections to the saint, including those of Naples and Castile, and she was also strongly supported by the Franciscan Order. An early 14th-century fresco cycle in the Clarissan church of S Maria Donna Regina in Naples, was commissioned by Mary of Hungary, Queen of Naples (...

[Fr.: ‘enamel’]

Émail ink is the ink used on glass and porcelain; émail ombrant is a form of pottery decoration (introduced in the 1840s) in which the impressions of the design appear as shadows; émail brun is not an enamel, but a medieval technique whereby an oil varnish (or linseed oil) is burnt into metal (e.g. in the Corona Lucis at Buckfast Abbey in Devon)....

Vitreous or glass paste used in a variety of ways to decorate a metal or, more rarely, ceramic surface. The word ‘enamel’ is of obscure origin. It probably derives from smelzan (Old High Ger.: ‘to smelt’) and esmail (Old Fr.). The Greek philosopher Philostratos Lemnios wrote that ‘barbarians…pour these colours into bronze moulds, so that the colours become hard as stone’ (Imagines I. xxviii); the ‘colour’ probably refers to molten glass. This may have been a description of a process which was not enamelling but its precursor. The art of enamelling was a logical progression in the artistic alliance between the goldsmith and the glassworker. During the 15th century bc in Egypt coloured, cut-glass pieces were decoratively embedded into gold cloisons (cells); the inclusion of molten glass may have been a later refinement of the Greeks and the Celts.

The enamelling process is the fusing of a vitreous substance on to a prepared metal surface, either in a kiln (furnace) or with the application of intense local heat (e.g. with a blowtorch), at temperatures ranging from 300°C for the softest (opaque) enamels to 850°C for the hardest (transparent) enamels. The vitreous compound is itself called enamel, but it is the bipartite, heat-bonded combination of often noble metal with it that is referred to as enamel....

Architectural and decorative arts style that flourished in the USA from shortly after the acknowledgement of independence in the Treaty of Paris (1783) until c. 1820. The term is derived from the period surrounding the creation of the federal constitution in 1787 and was in use in a political sense by that year. Essentially it was a form of Neo-classicism, strongly influenced by manifestations of that style in England and, to a lesser extent, in France; but at times certain more conservative qualities inherited from the previous Colonial period are also present. The inspiration of European, and especially English, Neo-classical architecture was to be expected in a society grounded in that of 18th-century England; but an added impetus was the association often cited at the time between the fledgling American republic and the ancient Roman one.

Although a few indications of European Neo-classical influence are found in the American colonies before the Revolution began in ...

Term applied to a style of architecture and the decorative arts inspired by the Gothic architecture of medieval Europe. It has been particularly widely applied to churches but has also been used to describe castellated mansions, collegiate buildings, and houses. The Gothic Revival has also been described by many scholars as a movement, rather than style, for in the mid-19th century it was associated with and propagated by religious and political faith. From a hesitant start in the mid-18th century in England and Scotland, in the 19th century it became one of the principal styles of building throughout the world and continued in some huge projects until well into the 20th century (e.g. Episcopal Cathedral, Washington, DC, 1908–90; by G(eorge) F(rederick) Bodley and others). ‘Gothic Revival’ became the standard English term when Charles Locke Eastlake published A History of the Gothic Revival (1872). The word ‘Gothic’ had by then definitely mutated from a depreciatory epithet into the denomination of a style or period of medieval architecture. To distinguish medieval Gothic from modern Gothic, most European languages used the prefix ‘neo-’ (e.g. Dut. ...

(b Solothurn, c. 1485; d ?Basle, 1527–9).

Swiss draughtsman, goldsmith, die-cutter, engraver, woodcut and stained-glass designer, painter and glass painter. He was the most original and gifted artist of the early Renaissance in German-speaking Switzerland. His highly imaginative drawings, created as independent works of art, are works of exceptional quality, vitality, expressiveness and often humour. For northern European art, Graf played an important role in the liberation of drawing from its traditionally subsidiary status as preparatory study for works of art in other media.

Graf was trained as a goldsmith by his father, Hug Graf (d 1527–30), and remained active in this profession throughout his career. Although almost none of his goldsmith work is preserved, examples such as the silver engraved plates (1519; London, BM; Zurich, Schweizer. Landesmus.) from a reliquary bust executed for a monastery in the canton of Lucerne are of a high quality. He received additional training (1507–8) from the goldsmith ...

(b 1812; d 1867).

English stained-glass maker and metalworker. Based in Birmingham, his company produced metalwork and stained glass for A. W. N. Pugin, whom Hardman first met in 1837. Together with other craftsmen, he exhibited examples of his work for Pugin, including a chalice (London, V&A), at the so-called Medieval Court in the Great Exhibition, London, in 1851. He also collaborated with Jean-Baptiste Charles François Bethune, who set up a stained-glass workshop in Bruges in 1845 with Hardman’s assistance.

Bethune, Jean-Baptiste-Charles-François

Cross, §III, 1(ii): Altar and processional: Renaissance and after

England, §IX, 1(v): Gold and silver, 1781–1895

England, §IX, 2(iv): Base metalwork, after 1800

Pugin: (2) A. W. N. Pugin, §2: Middle period, 1837–44

Pugin: (2) A. W. N. Pugin, §3: Late work, after 1844

Pugin: (2) A. W. N. Pugin, §3: Late work, after 1844

Pugin: (2) A. W. N. Pugin, §3: Late work, after 1844

Pugin: (3) E. W. Pugin

Stained glass, §II, 2(ii): 1800–1880...

(b Watford, Herts, April 21, 1861; d New York, Jan 27, 1940).

English designer and maker of stained glass, metalwork and enamel. In the mid-1870s he was apprenticed to the London firm of Burlison & Grylls, makers of stained glass in the Gothic Revival style. He later joined Heaton, Butler & Bayne, the firm of stained-glass manufacturers and painters founded by his father, Clement Heaton (1824–82), whom he succeeded as a partner in 1882. In 1884 he left London for Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where he collaborated with Paul Robert on the decoration of the monumental staircase (in situ) of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, experimenting with cloisonné enamel as an enrichment for the pilasters, mouldings and cornices. On his return to England in 1885 Heaton executed enamel designs for A. H. Mackmurdo and provided designs for metalwork and lamps for the Century Guild of Artists. Following a dispute in 1885, Heaton left Heaton, Butler & Bayne and established Heaton’s Cloisonné Mosaics Ltd, which produced plaques, book covers and lamps. After ...

French term used to describe a range of European borrowings from Japanese art. It was coined in 1872 by the French critic, collector and printmaker Philippe Burty ‘to designate a new field of study—artistic, historic and ethnographic’, encompassing decorative objects with Japanese designs (similar to 18th-century Chinoiserie), paintings of scenes set in Japan, and Western paintings, prints and decorative arts influenced by Japanese aesthetics. Scholars in the 20th century have distinguished japonaiserie, the depiction of Japanese subjects or objects in a Western style, from Japonisme, the more profound influence of Japanese aesthetics on Western art.

There has been wide debate over who was the first artist in the West to discover Japanese art and over the date of this discovery. According to Bénédite, Félix Bracquemond first came under the influence of Japanese art after seeing the first volume of Katsushika Hokusai’s Hokusai manga (‘Hokusai’s ten thousand sketches’, 1814) at the printshop of ...

(Jules)

(b Ay, Marne, April 6, 1860; d Paris, 1945).

French jeweller, glassmaker and designer. He began his studies at the Lycée Turgot near Vincennes and after his father’s death (1876) he was apprenticed to the Parisian jeweller Louis Aucoq, where he learnt to mount precious stones. Unable to further his training in France, he went to London to study at Sydenham College, which specialized in the graphic arts. On his return to Paris in 1880, he found employment as a jewellery designer creating models for such firms as Cartier and Boucheron. His compositions began to acquire a reputation and in 1885 he took over the workshop of Jules d’Estape in the Rue du 4 Septembre, Paris. He rejected the current trend for diamonds in grand settings and instead used such gemstones as bloodstones, tourmalines, cornelians and chrysoberyls together with plique à jour enamelling and inexpensive metals for his creations. His jewellery, which was in the Art Nouveau style, included hair-combs, collars, brooches, necklaces and buckles (e.g. water-nymph buckle, ...

Glass figurines and ornamental groups made from glass heated in the flame of a lamp and blown and shaped by hand. Nineteenth-century examples range from simple figures sold at fairs to complex and delicate models of ships. In the 20th century Bimini Glass, the company founded in 1923 by the Austrian glassmaker Fritz Lampl, produced graceful figurines made from lamp-blown glass; the popularity of these products has made ‘bimini’ a generic term for lamp-blown European glass of the interwar period. In ...