Art Nouveau Animal Designs and Patterns: 60 Plates in Full Color (Dover Pictorial Archive)

This design collection includes all 60 full-color plates from L'animal dans la décoration, a rare turn-of-the-century portfolio by M. P. Verneuil. Meticulously reproduced from the originals, these plates offer a splendid demonstration of the application of animal forms to decorative art. Included are not only representations of such traditional decorative motifs as deer, swans, and peacocks, but also depictions of creatures seldom associated with beauty and ornamentation: bats, mice, lizards, insets, and other less conventional subjects. M. P. Verneuil was one of the leading lights of the influential Art Nouveau movement. His extraordinary inventiveness and draftsmanship can be seen here in detailed tableaux of animals and plants often wittily represented as interlocking parts of a larger decorative design. Butterflies, dragonflies, and bats float amid schematized flora; sea horses, flying fish, and gulls cavort in and above stylized seas; and a host of other fauna is similarly rendered with breathtaking imagination and ingenuity.
Graphic artists, illustrators, craftspeople — any student of design — will want to have this book as an invaluable copyright-free source of artistic inspiration and as an eye-opening excursion into the rich and sensuous realms of the finest Art Nouveau design.

The Art Nouveau movement originated in late 19th-century France, where Maurice Pillard Verneuil (1869–1942) achieved international renown as a leading designer in the new style. Verneuil was particularly interested in the decorative potential of flowers, and he created countless realistic and imaginative floral patterns.