Polychromatic decoration

Abstract

This is a curious and puzzling book, as well as a rarity. One thinks immediately of the English/American artist Charles Robert Leslie (1794-1859) but I do not think he was the author. OCLC also locates one copy only of the English edition (Toronto PL), also published in the same year, 1884 by August Fischer. The present American edition consists of the original chromolithographic plates, printed in London by August Fischer and a cancel title page as well as an American binding. The book was obviously an outgrowth of the nineteenth century mania for historic ornament, the genesis of which was Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament. The quality of the color printing, done on glazed paper, is very high. Higher, I think, than would have been possible in America at this date. (Charles Wood, cat. 167, # 78)