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[Società Cooperativa Aemilia Ars]

Workshop founded in Bologna in 1898 by the architect Alfonso Rubbiani (1848–1913), modelled on the English Arts and Crafts Movement; its formal name was Società Cooperativa Aemilia Ars. At first the workshop produced a wide range of products, including glass and pottery, but from 1902 to 1914 its principal products were textiles, especially lace....

[Fr. point d’Alençon]

Type of lace produced in France. In 1675 a group of 30 Venetian lacemakers was settled in the Norman town of Alençon by Jean-Baptiste Colbert (Louis XIV’s minister of finance). The Venetians instructed local needlewomen in point de Venise, but by the 1690s the distinctive local style known as point d’Alençon had emerged (see alsoLace §2, (iii), §2(iii)). Needlewomen adopted the net ground technique, and invented a series of new stitches.

Lace production was halted at the Revolution because of its association with the ancien régime, but revived under Napoleon (reg 1804–14) and again under the Second Empire. Lace is still produced in Alençon, supported by the Atelier National du Point d’Alençon founded in 1976, and there are good collections of Alençon lace in the Musée de la Dentelle au Point d’Alençon and the Musée des Beaux-Arts et de la Dentelle.

The term point d’Alençon now denotes a style as well as a place of origin. The style is characterized by a uniform mesh (called the ...

[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....

German, 19th century, male.

Born 8 April 1816, in Siegritz (district of Ebermannstadt); died 13 April 1896.

Watercolourist, draughtsman. Urban landscapes.

An amateur artist, Audenrith was first a weaver, then a worker in a wire factory in Nuremberg. He was only able to practise his art in his spare time, but nonetheless produced some fine work, reproducing the picturesque beauty of Nuremberg with a great sense of realism. His paintings are preserved in the city's art collection. A selection of his paintings were published as lithographs by W. Biede in ...

English town in Devon, situated on the River Axe, known as a centre of carpet production from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th. In 1755 Thomas Whitty (d 1792), a weaver from Axminster, visited Pierre Parisot’s carpet workshop in Fulham, London. An apprentice showed him the workshop, and on his return to Axminster Whitty built a large vertical loom, taught his daughters to tie the symmetrical or Ghiordes knot (see Carpet, §I, 1) and began to produce carpets. In 1757 he submitted a carpet measuring 4.9×3.8 m to the Royal Society of Arts and was awarded a joint prize with Thomas Moore (c. 1700–1788; see Carpet, §II, 2, (iii)) of Chiswell Street, London. Whitty valued his carpet at £15 and the Society ruled it the best carpet in proportion to its price. In 1758 he was asked to submit three carpets and shared the prize with ...

English family of merchants, bankers, politicians, collectors and patrons. John Baring (1697–1748) came from a Lutheran family in Bremen and settled in Exeter, Devon, in 1717. The success of his clothmaking business enabled him to acquire a large house, Larkbeare, and landed estate on the outskirts of the city. His portrait was painted by William Hoare (c. 1740s) and that of his wife, Elizabeth Baring (1702–66), by Gainsborough (c. 1750s; both London, Barings PLC). John Baring’s son Sir Francis Baring, created 1st Baronet in 1793, was a merchant and financier and founder in 1762 of Baring Brothers in London, which became Baring Brothers & Co. Ltd. Francis had three sons who were partners in the firm: Sir Thomas Baring (i), 2nd Baronet, Alexander Baring, created 1st Baron Ashburton in 1835, and Henry Baring (1776–1848). Thomas Baring (i)’s sons included Francis Baring, 1st Lord Northbrook (...

(b 1845; d 1908).

American interior decorator and founder of the first tapestry factory in the USA. He worked for Herter Brothers (see Herter, Christian) on the decoration of a series of grand houses, notably William H. Vanderbilt’s house on Fifth Avenue, New York, and William Welsh Harrison’s Grey Towers Castle (now part of Arcadia University) in Philadelphia. When the Vanderbilt house was completed in 1882, Christian Herter returned to Germany and Baumgarten took over the company. In 1891 he started his own company, William Baumgarten and Company, Inc., and in 1893 complemented his interior decoration business with a tapestry factory in his Fifth Avenue premises. He recruited weavers and dyers from the Royal Windsor Tapestry Manufactory (which had closed in 1890), including five weavers from the Foussadier family. The factory’s tapestries include one at Grey Towers (1898).

German, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 14 April 1868, in Hamburg; died 27 February 1940, in Berlin.

Painter, draughtsman, engraver, architect, designer, decorative artist, graphic designer. Posters, furniture, wallpaper, carpets, glassware, ceramics, table services, jewellery, silverwork, objets d'art, typefaces.

Jugendstil, functional school.

Die Sieben (Group of Seven), Deutscher Werkbund...

French, 19th century, male.

Born 28 March 1807, in Guillotière near Lyons; died, in Lyons.

Painter.

Studied under Grobon and Thierriat at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyons from 1823 to 1827. Worked as a textile designer in Lyons and exhibited at the Lyons Salon from ...

(b St Pierre de Vaise, Lyon, May 17, 1754; d Lyon, Oct 24, 1843).

French painter, teacher and designer. According to his uncorroborated 19th-century biographer J. Gaubin, he was intended for holy orders and began studying flower painting as a novice (Rev. Lyon., i, 1856). Certainly he studied drawing under the sculptor Antoine-Michel Perrache (1726–79) and worked for Lyon’s silk industry as a textile designer, visiting Paris annually, ostensibly to keep abreast of the latest fashions. He first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1791 and settled in Paris in about 1794, probably as a consequence of the catastrophic siege and destruction of Lyon by revolutionary forces the previous year. Initially he eked out a precarious living decorating snuff-boxes and painting miniatures, supported by friends such as Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, the poetess, and the miniature painter Jean-Baptiste Augustin, to whom Berjon dedicated The Gift (1797; Lyon, Mus. B.-A.). He contributed to seven Paris Salons between 1796 and 1819 and again in ...

French, 18th – 19th century, male.

Born 17 May 1754, in Lyons; died 24 October 1843, in Lyons.

Painter (gouache), watercolourist, pastellist, engraver, draughtsman, miniaturist. Portraits, still-lifes (flowers/fruit), costume studies. Designs for fabrics.

Berjon was the son of a butcher and grew up in the Vaise suburb of Lyons. He initially worked with his father; then, it is thought, he gave this up to study medicine, before learning to draw with the sculptor Perrache in Lyons. Eventually he became a designer at a silk manufacturer in Lyons, and began to paint. He often travelled to Paris on business, where he got to know several painters and became friends with the portrait artist Augustin. As a result of the destruction of the silk factory during the siege of Lyons, Berjon moved to Paris, where he lived in abject poverty for many years. He eventually returned to Lyons and went to work for an embroidery manufacturer and, in ...

German, 20th century, male.

Active in the USA.

Born 15 March 1883, in Stuttgart; died 29 May 1972, in New York.

Painter, sculptor, graphic designer, poster artist, illustrator, architect, designer, decorative artist. Designs for carpets, advertising art, furniture, lamps, wallpaper.

Jugendstil.

Deutscher Werkbund.

Lucian Bernhard studied painting at the Kunstakademie in Munich, but taught himself design. He was active in Berlin. In ...

German, 20th century, male.

Born 1873, in Munich; died 1933, in Bad Nauheim.

Tapestry maker, glassmaker, interior designer. Designs (furniture).

Jugendstil.

Karl Bertsch was a self-taught tapestry maker. In 1902, with Adelbert Niemeyer, he created a workshop making furniture and interior decoration items, which they called the Müncher Werkstätten für Wohnungseinrichtung. In ...

Type of lace made since the 17th century at Binche, near Brussels and Valenciennes, both of whose laces it resembles. It is a heavy lace with decorative grounds, and was used for bedspreads and as a costume trimming. The name has since become the generic term for the type of lace once made at Binche....

French, 18th – 19th century, male.

Born c. 1760, in Givors (Rhône); died c. 1825, in Paris.

Painter (including gouache), draughtsman. Allegorical subjects, landscapes, flowers, fruit. Decorative designs, patterns (fabrics).

Although he has a considerable reputation as a designer for the silk industry, little is known about his life. After studying with Gonichon at the art school in Lyons, he completed his studies in Paris. It seems he stood in for J. Barraband as a teacher of flower-painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyons in ...

(b 1754; d 1825).

French painter and designer of textiles and embroideries. He trained with Philippe de Lasalle and went on to become one of the most celebrated designers of textiles and embroidery for Lyon silk manufacturers. His clients included the Empress Josephine, for whom he designed the furniture fabrics at Malmaison (near Paris), and the Empress Marie-Louise, for whom he designed a coronation robe. His work in every medium is chiefly remarkable for its flowers. It is sometimes difficult to attribute work with confidence to Bony or de Lasalle; the silk wallpaper for Marie-Antoinette’s bedroom in Versailles (of which some is now in the Musée Historiques des Tissus in Lyon), for example, could be by either artist....

(b Besançon, 1812; d Dornach, 1877).

French photographer. He worked in Paris as a textile designer, discovering his interest in photography in 1853, when he photographed a collection of 300 studies of flowers intended to serve as models for painters and fabric designers (see fig.). He set up a studio in Paris in 1868. His subjects were very diverse—reproductions of works of art, architecture (e.g. the Peristyle of the New Opéra, c. 1874; see Regards sur la photographie en France au XIXe siècle, pl. 30), portraits, landscapes, still-lifes and unposed, spontaneous photographs of city life. He travelled widely in Europe and also in Egypt, producing panoramic landscape photographs. He published an album of his photographs of the landscapes of Alsace in 1858. From 1859 onwards he collaborated with many other French photographers, and from 1858 to 1862 he photographed landscapes in Switzerland, Germany and France. He was a member of the Société Française de Photographie from ...

French, 19th century, male.

Born, 13 June 1812, near Besançon, France; died 31 December 1877, in Dornach, France.

Photographer, textile designer, entrepreneur.

Botanicals, landscapes, nature, architecture, figures, animals.

Adolphe Braun had a successful career creating designs for printed fabrics and wallpapers. In the early 1840s, he was admitted to the Société Industrielle de Mulhouse, and designs by his firm were gaining international recognition. To provide his designers with models for study, Braun photographed botanical arrangements using the wet collodion process, which was perfected in the early 1850s. His albumen silver prints of flowers, grasses and botanical materials are richly toned and expressive, in contrast to standard scientific botanical studies. Although Braun initially approached photography as a technical means to further the art of textile design, he quickly realized the artistic merit of his photographs and distributed them to a wider public in catalogues....