This precious French's bijou is amazing. An excellent reference for interior designers and architects.

This is a reproduction of a 1902 portfolio with Beautiful Art Nouveau Plates. Not a lot of text but the illustrations are the stars. Enjoy looking through this book

The architectural sketches in this book are beautifully ornate! The sentences describing them are ornate, too.... Architects and all types of artists will enjoy this book.

When the Art Nouveau movement came out of France there was an immediate sense of a break from the past into something that was organic and alive with possibilities. A new sensibility for a new age. It was in design that the fin-de-siècle came to life and in this reprinted book by René Binet from 1902 "Decorative Sketches" we see it's best exposition on the page. We have come to have this design as part of our cultural life still as its echoes in design are everywhere and cultural history was deeply affected by this movement. On its own this book is a work of beauty that can be admired by anyone who loves design, but its historical importance makes anyone interested in cultural history a must purchase.

What a wonderful walk down architectural history, I have been a massive fan of the beautiful stylised designs of the of the Art Nouveau period, so simple yet so ornate. This book offers a look at 60 plates of wonderful sketches from the era of the early 1900 in Paris
The designs are stunning and I marvel at what it would have been like to live amongst all the art., from wallpaper, ironwork, lamps and even furniture.

Another well done art book from Dover--for a niche audience. Jewelry and furniture designers as well as architects will appreciate the exquisite illustrations. Plates in the back of the book include photographs as well as vintage drawings.

Full of run-on sentences and plate after plate of gorgeous drawings of stairs, flourishes, ornaments, motifs, signs, buildings, walls, lamps, erm, quite a complete tribute to pretty.

<i>To start with, why wouldn't he have felt passionate about Nature, in its immense labor; expanding on his experiences, attempting to succeed, by creating an incalculable variety of drawings based on the protists, which separate themselves into two kingdoms: one attached to the soil, growing from the ground where it was born, a type that cannot move through its own will: the vegetable organism; the other, whereby its organisms have the faculty of being able to move from place to place:the animal organism. <i>

If this sentence greatly interests you, you will love the text. The plates are enjoyable enough on their own. This would appeal to a very specific reader, and I am fairly certain that they know who they are.

Decorative Sketches republishes a 1902 collection of 60 plates from Esquisses Decoratives, a French publication, on the designs of Rene Binet. The forward has been translated from the original French and is nearly inscrutable (and surprisingly risible) in its fin de siecle pomposity.

The plates are in color, though only a few are multi colored (most have a paper-bronze color tone). The interesting aspect is that Binet (famous at the time for creating the highly detailed 1900 World's Fair Monumental Door in Concorde Square, Paris) drew upon microscope 'slices' as his inspiration. The blurb in the back of the book about nature is somewhat misleading: Binet used the repeating patterns and intricate cell structures of plant and animal dissection to create very intricate designs that often feel very 'busy' but also otherworldly. So although this is at the height of the art nouveau period, his designs feel almost Arabic-inspired in their geometric precision. There are no people and interspersed in the cellur patterns are a lot of random elements such as acanthus leaves or parakeets.

Imagine slices of items such insect wings, sea sponges, coral, and other repeating pattern motifs and you get the idea - this isn't about flowing nouveau lines so much as an exploration of microscopic nature. For most of the designs, it was hard to determine what to look at because there was so much going on and in very small relief/detail. Oddly enough, leopards were randomly thrown on top of a lot of the designs - creating a bit of a disparity between microscrope designs and whole animals. Many of the designs didn't even feel art nouveau at all.

Binet's designs were definitely unique and I imagine their complicated nature made them very hard to replicate in reality. But as always, I am grateful for Dover republishing these fascinating historical plate collections. Binet's nouveau was definitely original for his time and worth the exploration. As well, the pompous introduction was good for a chuckle and perhaps even a slight snicker at viewpoints from a very different time. Reviewed from an advance reader copy provided by the publisher.