Cygne Sauvage [Wild Swan]

Description

original colour chromolithograph.

Zoology print from ‘L’animal dans la décoration’ by Maurice Pillard Verneuil and Eugène Grasset; pl. 1, published by Imprimerie Lemercier et cie, Paris.
Verneuil (1869-1942) was a French artist and interior decorator. He studied with Eugène Grasset, a Swiss illustrator noted for his theatrical posters. While sharing Grasset’s use of bold outlines and solid color forms, Verneuil’s own style shows a love of expressive, sinuous curvilinear forms reflecting the emergence of Art Nouveau.
In this 1897 portfolio, Verneuil celebrates a rich variety of designs based on plant and animal forms: birds, fish and other sea creatures, seashells, and insects, flowers and trees. Reducing living creatures into playful decorative devices and geometric patterns, he provides dozens of striking examples to serve as models for adaptation by interior designers in creating wallpaper, textiles, decorative ironwork, or painted borders and friezes.