Pugin Alphabets from 1844

Illustration: A W N Pugin. Alphabet design, 1844.

The four examples that illustrate this article are alphabets created by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin in 1844. Being Pugin and being 1844 they are obvious in their gothic inspiration. However, the fonts are an interesting development in the career of Pugin and should be seen in tandem with his increasingly sophisticated pattern work.

Although Pugin is perhaps better known today as an architect, rather than a pattern designer, there has always been some dispute as to where his real talent lay. During his lifetime and immediately afterwards, he was admired more for his decorative qualities than for his architecture, which many saw as uninspired or at least undisciplined. However, most critics praised his mastery of line and colour and saw him as a natural decorative designer.

Illustration: A W N Pugin. Alphabet design, 1844.

Although the alphabets shown here were produced by Pugin along with a whole host of religiously inspired decoration and pattern work for his Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume published in 1844, much of the work could easily have been used for secular purposes. Decoration and pattern is very often, though not always, ambiguous and readily available for small tweaks and corrections in order to make it available for a different or larger market.

A case in point would be the four alphabets produced by Pugin, ostensibly for the use of the Catholic Church of which Pugin was a relatively new and therefore devout member. The alphabets could well have been used for a printed format, but more interestingly many of these fonts became an acceptable addition for embroidery or more specifically needlepoint which is often confused with tapestry by which it is also known. Although ecclesiastical embroidery became a significant growth area in Victorian Britain, particularly from the Gothic Revival onwards, domestic embroidery also increasingly used lettering to promote and embellish decorative work. The number of 'Home Sweet Homes' and various verses from the Bible or popular poetry that were placed within frames and then hung on the wall or offered as gifts, must have run into the hundreds of thousands.

Illustration: A W N Pugin. Alphabet design, 1844.

Most pattern designers in the nineteenth century, at some point, either created or adapted alphabets for use within their work, or offered them for the use of the general public in whichever format they decided to work them into. New alphabets seemed to turn up on a near weekly basis particularly within magazines which regularly offered an increasingly wide spectrum of fancy lettering to be used for embroidery. In some respects the interest in a panoply of fonts in the nineteenth century is perhaps no different than our own interest in novel and interesting diversions from the standard Arial or Times font that we have become so accustomed to with our domestic computers.

Illustration: A W N Pugin. Alphabet design, 1844.

Pugin himself used lettering liberally throughout the decorative work that he produced during his short career. He was even known to have used gothic lettering in particular on both ceramics and wallpaper. However, he was by no means alone in the usage and it was deemed, if not standard, then at least comfortably acceptable to use forms of lettering, particularly of past styles within the decorative arts. Much of the interest in the examination and the reuse of lettering from past eras, at least on the part of the designer, was in the excitement of re-examination. Much of the medieval and pre-medieval world had been cast aside and even buried by the various decorative styles, particularly that of the eighteenth century. For the designer of the nineteenth century to both rediscover and reuse the art of calligraphy, even if outside of the traditions of the discipline, gave a much larger scope to the decorative arts and allowed a much wider spectrum of creative freedom from the narrow confines of the classical. In this respect at least, Pugin was in full accord.

Further reading links: 
God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain
Pugin: A Gothic Passion
Pugin's Gothic Ornament: The Classic Sourcebook of Decorative Motifs with 100 Plates (Dover Pictorial Archives)
Pugin's Ecclesiastical Ornament (Dover Pictorial Archives)
Pugin's Floral Ornament CD-ROM and Book (Dover Full-Color Electronic Design)
A. W. N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival
The Stained Glass of A.W.N. Pugin
Pugin (Pioneers of Modern Architecture)
Victorian Embroidery: An Authoritative Guide
Victorian Needlework: Techniques and Designs
Victorian Fancy Stitchery: Techniques and Designs
Royal School of Needlework Embroidery Techniques
One Hundred Thirty Antique French Embroidery Alphabets
Letter Perfect: Over 40 Alphabets for Needlepoint and Embroidery
97 Needlepoint Alphabets

Stained Glass Window Design by Ford Madox Brown

Illustration: Ford Madox Brown. The Death of Tristram, 1862.

Of the artists, including Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rosetti, who contributed cartoons towards the set of stained glass windows for Harden Grange in Yorkshire, it is perhaps Ford Madox Brown that produced the most dynamic and emotionally successful composition.

All thirteen stained glass windows were set within the theme of the story of Tristram and Isoude. They were completed in 1862 with Ford Madox Brown contributing just one scene as compared to five by Edward Burne-Jones, though to be fair Rossetti only contributed two and Burne-Jones contribution seems out of proportion to the other artists.

Brown produced a scene that entailed the death of Tristram by King Mark. In the scene above, King Mark has just violently and treacherously butchered Tristram, while Isoude mourns the death of her lover. It is a powerful scene made the more so by the stance of King Mark who seems to fill at least half of the composition, Tristram and Isoude being squeezed into the lower section, as if their role in the story line was fading away. 

Brown often created a near graphic quality to his work with details both small and large being equally emphasised. These details very often picked out vignettes in a larger scene, and very often they were full of both social commentary and social criticism of the contemporary world he lived in.

Although to some extent the artist has been added to the Pre-Raphaelite group, he was never a whole-hearted member, in either temperament or subject matter. Although being close to Rossetti and later involved in William Morris first venture into the business world with Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co, there always seemed much more to Brown than drooping damsels and narrative scenes from Dante. Probably his two most important works, Work and The Last of England have no literary or romantic theme and were considered by many, when first displayed to the public, to be too real for polite consumption. Work in particular made relatively stark comments about social segregation and the roles within the class structure that were deemed almost predetermined by many in Victorian English society.  

Although the stained glass window design produced by Brown in 1862 cannot perhaps be seen within the same light as some of his more ambitious fine art work, it does still entail elements of the dynamism and strength of commitment to relating factors of the reality around the artist. This, in some respects counters much of the more romantically studied scenes that were, by the 1860s, becoming so much a factor of the fine artists view of the world, particularly in England where the reality of life under the industrial revolution was, if anything, either under documented by the art world, or not deemed a subject worth portraying through the subject of art. This perhaps says much about the relationship between art and industry in England during the nineteenth century, but also perhaps says much about the disassociation between wealthy and poor, with those who could afford it living in areas that saw little if any disturbance from the industrial revolution, at least in the respect of the working class, belching chimneys and cramped and substandard accommodation. 

In some respects, what artists such as Rossetti and Burne-Jones were doing, were diverting the cultured and rich eye, not always the same thing, from the realities of the contemporary world they lived in. Medieval fantasies helped to create a world of pre-industry, one very often filled with happy and contented workers and indulgent and masters. All of course was a fantasy in the extreme, but the fact that it was indulged for so long must say something relatively profound about the era itself.

Although Brown did also indulge in literary themed narratives and he could never really be portrayed as a fighter for social justice per se, he did bring an occasional element of the contemporary world, including its more questionable practices and suppositions, into the public arena, and perhaps that is all that can be asked of an artist within the context of his own era.

Further reading links: 
Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer
The Art of Ford Madox Brown
Ford Madox Brown: The Unofficial Pre-Raphaelite
Into the Frame: The Four Loves of Ford Madox Brown
The Diary of Ford Madox Brown
Ford Madox Brown: a record of his life and work
Work: Ford Madox Brown's Painting and Victorian Life
Stained Glass and the Victorian Gothic Revival (Studies in Design & Material C)
Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism (Studies in Arthurian and Court)
The Victorian World Picture
Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art)
Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)
Reinventing King Arthur: The Arthurian Legends In Victorian Culture (Nineteenth Century Series)

Tessellated Pavement from Meaux Abbey

 Illustration: Tessellated pavement design from Meaux Abbey, Yorkshire, England.

The two illustrations for this article derive from Meaux Abbey in East Yorkshire, England. Although nothing now remains of the structure of the Abbey which was originally founded in 1151, various decorative elements have been found in the past.

After the abbey was closed in 1539 by order of Henry VIII, it was eventually dismantled and carted away to Hull where it was used to help build defences for the town. An ignominious and perhaps specifically pointed end to a building that had been created specifically for spiritual use. Some of the flooring must either have escaped notice, or probably more correctly, appeared unrelated to the more substantial building materials found elsewhere in the Abbey.

In this respect, two decorative tessellated floors were found in 1834 and were sketched at the time, the two illustrations shown here, being from that period. What has become of the floors since they were discovered is uncertain as there seems little, if any mention of them after their initial discovery. There are some small pieces of ceramic tiling still extant, though no sign of more substantial flooring.

At any rate, the two illustrations from 1834 give a fascinating insight into geometrical medieval pattern work. It would probably be fair to say that these images are relatively exact, compared at least to earlier periods, as by 1834 the old antiquarian study of artefacts was becoming much more exacting, scientifically based and professionally motivated. Both examples have used the circle as the mainstay of the decoration, with the full use of the concentric, along with floral motifs also produced in a strictly geometric style using arcs of circles to produce the petals. Anyone familiar with a compass will know how easily, but effectively, full circles and arcs of circles can be used to produce often complex pattern work.

Illustration: Tessellated pavement design from Meaux Abbey, Yorkshire, England.

The full beauty of these two decorative floor pieces is indeed the fact that there is little that falls outside of the circular. Although the second illustration does seem to give the appearance of the addition of straight lines to the pattern work, this could easily be accounted for by the emphasis of the edging of separate pieces that were used in the making of the pattern, rather than the use of line itself.

Both examples of pattern work give a good indication of medieval sophistication when it came to pattern for decorative effect. It is interesting to note that although much of what we see from the medieval period in Europe does tend to be figurative in format, the abstract was used fairly extensively, particularly within religious interiors. These types of floors, ranging from Sicily to Scandinavia, although varying in style, material and skill, give an impression that the abstract was used in pattern work just as effectively as it was in the Islamic world. There is also an element of symbolism and connection with spiritual ideas that are also shared with the Islamic decorative world, although how much of this was involved within the decoration found at Meaux Abbey, if any, is unknown.

If anyone has information as to what became of these two tessellated floor designs, I would be very grateful to hear from them.

Further reading links: 
On Four Spanish-Moresco Tiles Found At Meaux Abbey (1894)
Historic Floors (Conservation & Museology S.)
Westminster Abbey: The Cosmati Pavements (Courtauld Research Papers)
Mosaics of the Greek and Roman World
Italian Mosaics: 300-1300 (Prequel to Italian Frescoes)
The Mosaic Decoration of San Marco, Venice
Medieval Art
Early Medieval Art (Oxford History of Art)
Decorated Medieval Floor Tiles of Somerset
Medieval Floor Tiles Of Northern England: Pattern And Purpose: Production Between The 13th And 16th Centuries
Medieval 'Westminster' Floor Tiles (MoLAS Monograph)
Historic English Churches: A Guide to Their Construction, Design and Features
The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church

Decorative Work of Marie Vogl

Illustration: Marie Vogl. Decorative pattern work, c1910.

The illustration for this article is a piece of decorative work by Marie Vogl produced in about 1910. Although it is always tempting to place both the design work and the designer within the cultural and political context of the era in which it was produced, it might be genuinely refreshing to look at a piece of design work without too many preconceptions, some of which are always inevitably misplaced.

The illustration itself deals with a piece of decorative work, it therefore has not been tagged as textile per se and has no definition within that as in printed, embroidered etc. It could well have been used as pattern work for a number of options including ceramics. Although pattern can very well be dependent upon the textural aspects of the material that it has to deal with, as in textile, wallpaper, ceramic etc., it is also surprising how robust and flexible it can be when asked to deal with a number of decorative situations, although to be fair this is often the result of good design from a good designer rather than necessarily the result of pattern work in general.

The specific decoration featured here is nature-based with a number of floral and leaf designs repeated throughout the pattern. It should be noted that most of the full flowers are singular, with repetitions being limited largely to the leaf work. This is often the case and has been through much of floral decorative history, where leaf motifs are used largely as background or foreground filler for the more impressive flower decoration which was usually picked out in a much punchier colour than the multiple leaves. Although it could be said that this is true of nature, or even the work of flower arrangers, and that designers merely copy what they see, it is also true to say that they are very much the tool of the pattern maker, whereby both flower and leaf are vehicles, vocabulary tools if you will, of the designer. 

All design, decoration and pattern are artificial constructs and serve the purpose of the designer, not the other way around. Using nature is always seen as a starting point and even those that have tried to closely follow the tenets that nature has set find themselves producing variations that suit their own personal creative needs, those of the society they live in, or simply the needs of the discipline and materials in which they choose, or are chosen for them.

In this particular case, although nature has been chosen as a source for inspiration, the result has become tightly packed within an invisible frame. The closely allied flowers and leaves leave little space for any form of expansive meandering and compositional freedom, where the spaces between objects can often be as important if not more so, than the pieces themselves. Much has to do with balance and harmony, using both negative and positive spaces to an equal beneficial effect. However, by limiting space the designer has managed to produce a piece of decorative work that gives the impression of dynamism due to its busy and close proximity. However, this also allows the eye to wander over a large amount of differing detail in a relatively close space. This in effect allows the viewer to pick out different aspects of the design without getting quickly bored. 

Although much decorative work has always been used as support rather than a focus and therefore only ever seen as a complement, this has not always been the case. Some decorative work has been seen as the feature, rather than secondary and this has led to decoration being seen in some quarters at least, as the leading interpretation and reflection of particular periods in time. This has sometimes even taken on some of the aspects and theories used by contemporary fine art.

In some respects, this singular piece of decorative work can be seen in that light. It is importantly largely non-repetitive, it has a balanced and well-thought out, though naturally appearing compositional framework and it does not necessarily limit itself to the practical necessities of a discipline, such as weaving for example. It is always difficult when likening the decorative arts to fine art as there are so many built in expectations and even prejudices on both sides. However, with so many artists now working in a range of traditionally design, decoration and craft disciplines, it would be interesting to note down exactly what are the parameters that separates the two worlds, worlds that for generations were often considered to be either side of the same coin.

Further reading links: 

Surface Pattern Design: A Handbook of How to Create Decorative and Repeat Patterns for Designers and Students
Repeat Patterns: A Manual for Designers, Artists and Architects
The Pattern Sourcebook: A Century of Surface Design
Basics Textile Design: Sourcing Ideas: Investigating Textures, Colors, Structures, Surfaces and Patterns Textile Designs: Two Hundred Years of European and American Patterns Organized by Motif, Style, Color, Layout, and Period
Repeating Patterns 1100 - 1800 (+ CD-Rom)
Pattern Motifs: A Sourcebook
Twentieth-Century Pattern Design
Patterns: New Surface Design
Pattern and Palette Sourcebook 2: A Complete Guide to Choosing the Perfect Color and Pattern in Design (Bk. 2)