Item of the Month, June 2012: Charles Barbier, Petite typographie privée d'ambulance (Paris: Chez l'auteur, c. 1815)

At first glance, this image might look familiar. It’s a coded text that uses raised dots to be read by the fingertips. But one group of people who won’t find the code easy to understand are readers of Braille. That’s because this text isn’t written in Braille, but in a precursor to Braille devised by Charles Barbier, known as night-writing.

Nicholas Marie Charles Barbier de la Serre (1767-1841) was a captain in the Napoleonic army, who became obsessed with ways to improve communication with his troops and in particular with relaying orders in the dark without alerting the enemy. Barbier’s solution was a kind of phonetic code - he split the French language into 36 sounds which he laid out in a grid of numbered rows and columns. Though various methods, Barbier suggested, these grid positions could be communicated, and the sounds understood. One of these methods used the hands, rather like sign language – a number of fingers on the light hand were touched to a number on the left hand, representing the number of rows and columns on the grid. In another variation the code was cut into a piece of paper with a pocket knife; in yet another dots were impressed into the paper using a blunted stylus – the first line of dots represented rows, the second columns.

Barbier was confident that his invention was a good one – he just didn’t know what it could be used for. Rough-handed soldiers found it hard to read the impressions with their fingertips and the system was dismissed by the army as impractical and difficult to learn. Undeterred, Barbier considered various other uses. In a series of self-published pamphlets, of which Petite typographie privée d'ambulance is one, he proposed uses ranging from teaching the illiterate to read and write, to surreptitious note-taking, to creating multiple copies of the same article.

Finally Barbier realised that a system that had been designed to be used in the dark could be equally useful to the blind. In 1821 he presented his method to the blind children at the Institution Nationale des Jeunes Aveugle for testing. It was by no means the first type of embossed text the pupils had encountered - the founder of the school, Valentin Haüy, had produced tactile books for the blind since 1786. However, Haüy’s alphabetic script was not at all suited to reading by touch – rounded letters are easily distinguished from another by sight, but with the fingers they are slow to read, even with two hands. Barbier’s invention was received enthusiastically by the testers, but there were problems – the system was phonetic, so no good for boys who needed to master spelling and grammar to prepare them for work. Worse, there was no punctuation, meaning that the sounds ran into one another and became jumbled.

In the end it was a pupil at the school who made the adaptions necessary to put the code to use. Louis Braille heard the presentation when he was just 12 years old. His improvements - adapting the code from a phonetic to an alphabetic one and using 6 dots rather than 12 - meant that it could be read quickly with the fingers of just one hand. It was these changes that made the system practical and fast enough to give blind pupils a taste of the independence they craved. In 1837 Braille published his modified code, and in 1854, it was officially adopted in all French schools.

By all accounts a stubborn and condescending man, Barbier continued to proclaim his écriture nocturne to be the superior system, even as it was eclipsed by the success of Braille’s. Nevertheless, Braille acknowledged Barbier’s contribution in the second edition of his work, praising the ‘ingenious’ invention that had allowed him to construct his system of communication for the blind.

Author: Jo Maddocks

Further reading:

Charles Barbier, Petite Typographie Privée d'Ambulance (Paris: Chez l'auteur, c. 1815)
Lennard Bickel, Triumph Over Darkness: the Life of Louis Braille (London : Unwin Hyman, 1988)
Elizabeth M. Harris, In Touch: Printing and Writing for the Blind in the Nineteenth Century (Washington : Smithsonian, 1981)

Soyez le bienvenu!

The Wellcome Trust was honoured to receive a visit today by H.E. The French Ambassador, M. Bernard Emié. Among the items shown to him was the most splendid of the Wellcome Library's recent French acquisitions, the portrait of the surgeon A.B. Imbert-Delonnes by Pierre Chasselat, 1799-1800, which has been described elsewhere on this blog (here and here).

The Ambassador was interested to hear that the gigantic tumour shown in a glass jar on the right of the drawing had belonged to a Minister of Foreign Affairs in the young French Republic, Charles Delacroix.

Above, Sir William Castell (left), Chairman of the Wellcome Trust, shows the drawing to M. Emié.

New article on a portrait of record

Drawing by Pierre Chasselat.
 Wellcome Library no. 729420i

An exceptional neoclassical portrait drawing that was acquired by the Wellcome Library in 2010 is the subject of an article in the current (April 2012) issue of The Burlington magazine. [1] The drawing, by Pierre Chasselat (1753-1814), is a portrait of the French surgeon A.-B. Imbert-Delonnes who, in the same year as the creation of the drawing (1800), served under Napoleon at the battle of Marengo. He was also involved in a number of controversial episodes, some of which are commemorated in the drawing.

 Following Marc Fecker's identification of the previously unidentified sitter as Imbert-Delonnes, the article, by Marc Fecker and William Schupbach, places  the drawing in the context of other works by Chasselat and by Jacques-Louis David (they were both pupils of Joseph-Marie Vien), and identifies the various works of furniture, painting, and sculpture shown in the portrait, among them (in the lower left corner) an oval portrait of the mayor of Angoulême, Perier de Gurat. Perier de Gurat suffered from appalling facial tumours which Imbert-Delonnes removed through a long and painful surgical operation. The engravings below, published by Imbert-Delonnes, show Perier de Gurat before and after that operation.

 

Above, Perier de Gurat before and after surgical removal of his tumours by Imbert-Delonnes in 1798/1799. 
Plates to Ange-Bernard Imbert-Delonnes, Nouvelles considérations sur le cautère actuel, Avignon 1812.

Here (right) is the detail from the lower left corner of Chasselat's drawing, showing the painting by Joseph Bose from which the first engraving of Perier de Gurat was made. The open book in front of it is a volume of the works of one of Imbert-Delonnes's professional role-models, Ambroise Paré (1510?-1590).

 Other details of the drawing are elucidated in the article. The drawing was purchased by the Wellcome Library with the aid of the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and The Art Fund, to whom go the renewed thanks of the Library.

 [1] Marc Fecker and William Schupbach, 'A recently discovered portrait of the surgeon Ange-Bernard Imbert-Delonnes (1747-1818) by Pierre Chasselat', The Burlington magazine, April 2012, 154: 236-240.

The Boilly exhibition in Lille

For anyone with easy access to Lille – and that includes anyone in London, which is 90 minutes from Lille by direct Eurostar train, at a price – the exhibition of works by the painter Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845) is well worth visiting. It is on display at the aptly named Palais des Beaux-Arts: the photograph (left) shows the north-east corner of this truly palatial building. Boilly was a local artist: he came from La Bassée (about 20km from Lille), practised painting at Arras (about 30km from La Bassée) and moved away to Paris in 1785.

Boilly's work is admired for its precision and virtuosity, treasured for its value as a historical witness, and loved for its humour and sympathy. These qualities are well-displayed in the exhibition, and indeed in this fittingly mounted and framed self-portrait drawing (right: no. 34) on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston, Massachusetts.

Boilly's early pictures from the Ancien Regime are gallant scenes in the manner of Beaumarchais's plays. Most of those exhibited are from a series painted for a nobleman called Calvet in Avignon and are on loan from Saint-Omer. (Other paintings from the same series in the Wallace Collection in London may not be lent.)

We discover that the stories shown in these paintings were given to Boilly by Calvet himself. As with a series of prints from the same period (Estampes pour servire à l’histoire des moeurs et du costume des françois dans le dix-huitième siècle, 1773-1784), the "authors" of the picture include not only the painter or engraver, but also the person who devised it (in this case Calvet), even if he never lifted a paintbrush or an engraving tool.

To help earn his family's bread and butter, Boilly painted many small portraits, all in the same format but nevertheless distinctive. He may have painted over 4,000 of them; they certainly appear regularly in the auction rooms. In the exhibition their character and number are suggested by a wall containing twenty of them hung together at the beginning of the exhibition (left).

Boilly's virtuosity is shown in his amazing trompe l'oeil paintings. One (no. 169) bought by Lille in 1974 is available in the museum shop in the form of trays, mouse-mats and fridge magnets. The catalogue reveals (p. 63) that the term trompe l'oeil was coined in 1800 to describe Boilly's paintings, though the genre itself had existed at least since the 17th century. Another superb example not in the exhibition was sold at Christie's New York last week (The Art of France, New York, 25 January 2012, lot 144: image, right, from Christie's catalogue). It shows the back of a torn canvas, with a cat looking though the hole at a pair of mackerel hanging from the back of the stretcher: all painted in oils! For this marvel a European private individual paid $842,500 (£541,649, €650,981) including buyer's premium.  In the exhibition, Boilly's genius is demonstrated in his trompe l'oeil oil paintings in grisaille imitating non-existent engravings after his own paintings: one such grisaille painting is lent by the National Gallery, London (reproduced further below).

Caught up in the French Revolution, Citoyen Boilly could not but be overwhelmed by daily life in Paris, which thereafter dominated his paintings, giving  them great historical value. In portraiture, his masterpiece is the Atelier of Isabey from the Louvre (no. 68), showing 31 men, mostly fellow artists, in the studio of the painter J.B. Isabey. They include the rising stars of the day such as the flower painter Pierre-Joseph Redouté, the Romantic mythologist Anne-Louis Girodet, the brilliant pair of neoclassical architects Percier and Fontaine, and Boilly himself. Equally significant are those omitted: the big guns of the establishment, such as Gros, David, and Ingres. A sensation when first exhibited in An VI (1798), at Lille it is shown with a number of painted sketches for the figures, showing the great amount of work that Boilly put into both the individual portraits and the mellifluous composition. One of the studies was stolen in 1964: its reproduction in the catalogue (p. 156) may lead to its identification.

Paris as a city of pleasure is brilliantly portrayed in the Entrance to the Turkish gardens (1812, no. 136) which was bought by the Getty Museum at Christie’s New York on 27 January 2010. Boilly normally works on a very small scale by the standards of his time, but this picture is large for him (73.3 x 91.1 cm.) and contains a very rich cast of characters amusing themselves in the square outside a Turkish restaurant and ice-cream parlour. One can see why the Getty was prepared to put aside $4.5 million for it. Also exhibited is one of Boilly's preliminary drawings for the painting, which was identified in Antwerp as a result of the publicity surrounding the Getty's purchase of the oil painting: the Getty Museum subsequently bought the drawing too (no. 137).

 

It is one of several paintings which excel at showing contemporary moeurs: others are paintings of women playing billiards (no. 126, from the Hermitage, St Petersburg), a father giving his daughter a geography lesson (no. 138, from the Kimbell, Fort Worth), and conscripts from 1807 passing through the Porte Saint-Denis (no. 130 from the Musée Carnavalet, Paris): a tiny detail in the lower right corner of the last painting shows a veteran who has lost his sight (right).

Wellcome Library no. 40474i

One of these contemporary scenes (here dated to 1807) is a painting lent by the Wellcome Library (above: no. 131). It shows vaccination being carried out, within the first decade of its introduction into France: the procedure is said to have been first carried out by Pinel at the Salpêtrière in 1800. It was shown next to no. 128, on loan from St Louis, Missouri, which is from the same year and about the same size, and shows a less affluent family following the progress of Bonaparte's army through Prussia on a map.

 

Above and right, the installation of the Wellcome Library and St Louis paintings, supervised by Gillian Boal (Wellcome Library), Thierry Germe (Architect) and Annie Scottez de Wambrechies (Conservateur en Chef).

Also on display was one of Boilly's drawings for the Wellcome Library painting (below: no. 132), suggesting that he had previously thought of it as a more compact and intimate scene, but later enlarged it to emphasize the gravity of the occasion.

The catalogue includes an essay by Humphrey Wine (of the National Gallery, London) on Boilly and Great Britain. It was a subject well worth investigating, but unfortunately it reveals that the British have been little interested in Boilly. Perhaps this is not surprising considering the amounts paid by British collectors for the home team: painters such as Devis, Zoffany, Edward Bird, Wheatley, Rowlandson, David Wilkie, and many other artists whose work overlaps with some aspect of Boilly's. Boilly was of course collected by the 4th Marquis of Hertford (the creator of the Wallace Collection, so named after his illegitimate son), but then Hertford was specializing in French art of the period. As a notable exception to the general British indifference, the author is kind enough to mention the Wellcome Library painting, which was acquired in 1994.

Provenances in the catalogue show who really did value Boilly. Williamstown, Massachusetts (pop. 7,754) in the Berkshires provides no fewer than three paintings. One (left: no. 65) had belonged to the Singer Sewing Machine heir Robert Sterling Clark, and passed to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. Following his example, the Clark Institute has bought another two pictures by Boilly, including a trompe l'oeil piece (no. 163). Lille itself, other institutions in the Nord such as Saint-Omer and Tourcoing, Versailles, the Musée du Louvre, the Musée Marmottan (where the present writer was privileged to see a smaller Boilly exhibition in 1984), the Musée Carnavalet and other Paris institutions, have also acquired valuable works which are on show here. 

In Boilly's own lifetime, Prince Nikolai Borisovich Youssoupoff  (1751-1831) owned four of the paintings now on display in Lille, one of which was bought before 1812: two are from the Pushkin Museum, Moscow (nos. 43 and 66), one from the Hermitage, St Petersburg (no. 126), and one was sold by the Soviet Union and is now on loan to Dallas Museum of Art (no. 44). Prominent dealers who have committed themselves to his work in recent times include Agnew's (nos. 128, 129, 131), Hazlitt Gooden and Fox (nos. 113, 138, 163, all now in America), Didier Aaron (191), and Etienne Breton (nos. 105, 189).

It is striking that three of the four paintings on loan from British collections have belonged to women. The National Gallery's grisaille (left: no. 186) was presented in 1937 by Emily Iznaga Clement, of a Cuban sugar-refining family, and had belonged to her sister Doña María Consuelo Iznaga y Clement, sometime Duchess of Manchester (1858-1909). The extraordinary trompe l'oeil table from Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire (below: no. 164, National Trust) had been bought by Rudyard Kipling's daughter Elsie, Mrs George Bambridge (1896-1976).
The Wellcome Library painting came from the sumptuous residence of Graziella Patiño de Ortiz-Linares, in the Avenue Foch, Paris. Another painting, the one owned by Robert Sterling Clark, had previously been bequeathed by Alfred De Rothschild to Almina, Countess of Carnarvon, who in 1895 had married the 5th Earl (d. 1923): she sold the painting from Highclere in 1925, and died as recently as 1969.

A further point that could be observed only by visiting the exhibition is that the ornate neoclassical frame of the Wellcome Library painting (above) has strong similarities to frames on two other works in the exhibition: no. 114, from the Louvre, and no. 184, from Saint-Omer. All three works passed through Galerie Charpentier: the Saint-Omer and Wellcome paintings both on 11 December 1934, the Louvre painting in 1959. Could the Galerie Charpentier have commmissioned these carved and gilt frames?

Congratulations to Lille for a fitting tribute to its brilliant native son on his 250th anniversary. The exhibition is considered to be of national importance and has therefore received funds from the French Republic. It is also sponsored by the Wellcome Library's Euston Square neighbours Grant Thornton. Unfortunately the exhibition is due to close on Monday 6 February, but for anyone who has a free day before that date, here is the Eurostar timetable from St Pancras to Lille. If you can't make it, both Louis-Léopold and his son Julien Léopold (called Jules, 1796-1874) are abundantly represented in the Wellcome Library by their graphic work, which is not treated very thoroughly in the exhibition. For students of the reception of literary works by women, the collection of portraits of women writers by Jules is particularly noteworthy (Wellcome Library no. 40182i).

The Lille exhibition catalogue is also available in the Wellcome Library: click here  for details. Other reviews of the exhibition available online include those of The Art Newspaper  and La Tribune de l'Art .

Mesmerism on show

Mesmeric therapy. Wellcome Library no. 44754i

Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) was the promoter of a form of animal magnetism (named Mesmerism after him), at first in Vienna (1773-1777) and subsequently in France (1778-1784). His unique selling point was the supply of mesmeric fluid that served to rebalance the magnetic polarity of the animal body. His doctrine was one of many that sought to bring the animal body (the microcosm) into harmony with the larger world outside (the macrocosm). Such doctrines have a long history, from Hippocratic aphorisms about the effects of weather on certain temperaments to our contemporaries' warnings about asthma, allergies and air pollution.

As a therapist, Mesmer, like other innovators (James Graham, Edward Jenner, John Brown etc.) offered his therapy outside the established world of academia, the court, and the royal colleges. Indeed, they sometimes came into conflict, as Mesmer did in Paris. Both his popular appeal and the disdain of the establishment brought him publicity of commercial value.

Hence the many depictions of his therapeutic sessions. One of them is shown in an oil painting in the Wellcome Library (above). The patients are seated around Mesmer’s baquet, a large flat drum containing mesmeric fluid. Pipes, tubes and cords emerging from the drum could be applied to the affected parts: one man on the far left is winding a cord doused in mesmeric fluid around his head, while several others are applying the ends of the tubes to their eyes (detail left). A woman in Turkish dress in the centre foreground is treating the eye of a child to a dose of the mesmeric fluid.

While oil paintings were seen by few, prints were seen by many, if only in the shop windows of print-sellers and stationers in the high streets of towns and cities. Among several prints of mesmeric therapy in the Wellcome Library is this coloured engraving of Mesmer in Paris (above), with text below describing the scene (Wellcome Library no. 17918i). It shows one gentleman resting his right foot on the drum so that mesmerism can be applied to his shin. There is also a view through to a second baquet in a room off at the left.

Until today, the catalogue description of this print made no mention of any of the authors (artist, designer, engraver or publisher) of this print: it was by an unidentified hand.However, Sotheby's have in their forthcoming drawings sale in New York a pair of drawings attributed to the artist Claude-Louis Desrais (1746-1816), and one of them (Sotheby's Old master drawings, New York 25 January 2012, lot 123) is the original design for the Wellcome Library's coloured engraving. Indeed Sotheby's say in their catalogue record that this drawing and a similiar one by Desrais were "probably intended for prints or book illustrations as they are reddened on the reverse". However, as the Wellcome Library print is much cruder in execution than the drawing -– Sotheby's drawing has much finer detail -- there may have been an intermediary print or drawing from which the Wellcome Library's engraving was copied. An impression of the same engraving is also in the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland, and no doubt there are others elsewhere.

The attribution to Desrais on stylistic grounds is satisfying because Desrais is known to have produced a portrait of Mesmer (right: Wellcome Library no. 23327i). If he was Mesmer's in-house image-maker, then, although he does not seem to be recorded as an oil-painter, could the Wellcome Library's painting also be by him? It does look like the work of someone unaccustomed to such a cumbersome medium.

The other drawing at Sotheby's (same sale, lot 124) shows a woman standing within a circular knee-high cage surrounded by three men in animated conversation. Another man (left) seems to be turning up a gas light, while on the right a demonstration is taking place of a closed vessel on a column. Perhaps someone familiar with public demonstrations of natural philosophy in Paris at this period can identify the event? It should be dated not later than 1816, the year of Desrais's death.

Music of the blind

Blind musicians in Paris. Detail of lithograph by Martin Sylvestre Baptiste, 1828. Wellcome Library no. 16519i

An article by Ingrid Sykes in the latest issue of Medical History considers the blind in Paris from an unusual angle: their sound. One might think that the blind would sound the same as the sighted, but no, not in Paris in the years before and after the French Revolution. [1]

There was in Paris a mediaeval institution called the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts, founded by King Louis IX in the thirteenth century. The Hospice was a self-governing community of 300 (quinze-vingts, or 15 x 20) blind and partially sighted men and women, their spouses and their children. The hospice's autonomy and antiquity, its often truculent and anarchic spirit, the fact that it was founded by a king and protected by a cardinal (the Grand Almoner, Cardinal de Rohan), all brought it into conflict with the new spirit of improvement and control in the French Enlightenment.

The character of the Hospice was expressed in its sound. The musicians of the Quinze-Vingts could be heard in Paris on the streets, at fairs, and at an all-night café. Fiddlers, woodwind performers and vocalists produced a raucous popular sound in which successive members would perform as soloists followed by a chorus in which all performers would join. The results were variously described as "depraved", "threatening", and even as "une scène si déshonorante pour l'espèce humaine" (a scene dishonourable to the human race). The politer sort would give them some small change in order to make them go away. The print above shows one of the Quinze-Vingts bands in their outlandish costume about to have a brawl on the street with a rival amputee musician.

Left, Valentin Haüy,with, far left, his brother, the crystallographer René-Just Haüy. Engraving by the brothers Boilly, Jules and Alphonse; Wellcome Library no. 545537i

A performance by a Quinze-Vingts band made a deep, though not favourable, impression on the reformer Valentin Haüy (1745-1822). It was after hearing a performance of the Quinze-Vingts, described by him as "cette atrocité", that Valentin Haüy decided to found a new institution for the blind, organized along more up-to-date lines. [2] This was the Institut des Jeunes Aveugles (Institute for Blind Youth), a typical Enlightenment institution. Secular, educational, managed by the sighted, run by the state and not by the church, the new organization's nature was signalled by its name: not a mediaeval Hospice but a structured Institut.

Aquatint with etching by Marlé, 1805. Wellcome Library no. 545557i

The character of the Institut was also signalled by its musical performances. Instead of the popular music of the Quinze-Vingts, the blind would be trained in the harmonic system of the composer Rameau: the new system was based on Cartesian mathematics and was published in a book ominously entitled Code de musique pratique (1761).

The Hospice had always existed and was there by Royal fiat. The Institut was an innovation and was there for a purpose. In the 1790s attempts were made by the revolutionaries to suppress the Hospice, invoking the inmates' licentious life-style and spirit of independence. Suppression was avoided, but, despite their disparate characters, the Hospice and the Institut were amalgamated in 1805, largely for financial reasons. The print above recording Pope Pius VII's visit in that year shows the more decorous appearance of the blind, their more harmonious means of music-making, and their more regimented organization under the Institut.





















Sébastien Guillié (1780-1865). Left, as a young man: lithograph by C. Motte. Wellcome Library no. 3852i. His initial is given as J by mistake. Right, in later life: photograph by Giraudon, 1865. Wellcome Library no. 12835i

The merger did not last. In 1816 a new director, the despotic doctor Sébastien Guillié (above), determined to rid the Institut of its association with the Quinze-Vingts: he moved it away to a new site where, in the name of progress, he could carry out ophthalmological experiments on the blind children selected as his victims. [3] The Quinze-Vingts musicians continued their performances on the street for some years more, but could not defy change indefinitely: their building is now the site of a modern ophthalmological centre, the Centre Hospitalier National d'Ophtalmologie des Quinze-Vingts à Paris.

There is more to it than that, and more is provided in the article, which is available free online. One last point: the whole story would provide marvellous material for an opera. Richard Strauss and Clemens Krauss wrote Capriccio about different genres of drama and the relation between words and music. Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill included in The Threepenny Opera street songs and conflict with the police. Perhaps the authors of Les Misérables would like to produce a successor to those works, based on the struggles of the Quinze-Vingts? There would be a dramatic conflict between the two types of music, the protagonists on each side would provide plenty of character, and there would be scope for a variety of indoor and outdoor sets. And Victor Hugo himself could have a cameo role: according to the article, he was one of the champions of the Quinze-Vingts in their struggle against bureaucracy.

[1] Ingrid Sykes, 'Sounding the "Citizen–Patient": the politics of voice at the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts in post-Revolutionary Paris', Medical history, 2011 October; 55(4): 479–502. Available free online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3199644/

[2] Pierre Henri, La vie et l'œuvre de Valentin Haüy, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984, pp 37-43 (find in the Wellcome Library here)

[3] Zina Weygand, The blind in French society from the Middle Ages to the century of Louis Braille, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009, pp. 261-267 (find in the Wellcome Library here)

Lace Work of Felix Aubert

Illustration: Felix Aubert. lace design, c1904.

In some rspects at least, lace could be said to be a perfect vehicle for the Art Nouveau movement. Its natural affinity to filigree, elegance and fragility lends itself perfectly to the more imaginative and free-flowing elements of the style. This is perhaps why so many designers added to the vocabulary of lace design work during the last decade of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth century.

To be fair, Art Nouveau created a number of its own regional, national and creatively unique styles and although still broadly known as Art Nouveau in style, the specific regionalism of Europe saw determined differences appearing in Austria, Germany, France, Belgium and other areas as far apart as Finland to Portugal.

Illustration: Felix Aubert. Lace design, c1904.

On top of this was also added the unique qualities produced by the creative element of each designer. Although being affected obviously by their own regional interpretation of Art Nouveau, this did not negate the fact that the individual was to add a distinctiveness that came from personal memory, intuition, observation and understanding that could only be interpreted by that individual.

Art Nouveau, like many decorative styles past and present, used nature as its inspirational starting point. Indeed the style made an issue of its intimate knowledge, even entanglement with the processes, connections and partnerships to be found in the natural world. In this respect, the undulating, overlapping and invasive nature of plant forms for example, were seen as perfect vehicles for a number of disciplines including naturally, lace. 

 Illustration: Felix Aubert. Lace deign, c1904.

The four examples that illustrate this article were produced by the French designer Felix Aubert in about 1904. Although admittedly at the end of the Art Nouveau movements influence, these four designs still carry much of the natural affinity towards fragile filigree that was so much a part of the movements perceived style, one that was readily taken over into the lace craft.

Although Auberts work seems to lend itself, at least in part, to the more formalised nature based decoration to be found in Central Europe for example particularly that found in Austria, there is also a level of intimate delicacy that still maintains a formalisation within a fragile setting that can be found more readily in France and Belgium.

Illustration: Felix Aubert. Lace design, c1904.

There is an element in Auberts work that is reminiscent of pressed flowers or desiccated leaves. Some of the lace work gives the impression that if scrunched in the hand the piece would disintegrate. Perhaps in some ways this is both the strength and appeal of this form of lace work. Some would even see this particular period as being one of the high points, despite the long and relatively varied history of the craft. With such examples as produced by Aubert at the beginning of the twentieth century it is hard to disagree. This late, and very possibly last flowering of lace craft was conceivably one of its most creatively inspiring.

Further reading links: