Series Spotlight - Maurice Pillard Verneuil

Maurice Pillard Verneuil was a French artist best known for his Art Nouveau and Art Deco textile and wallpaper-like designs and poster art, often featuring repeating geometric patterns and natural influences as well as a Japonisme inspired flattened form and ukiyo-e-esque styles. His 1897 portfolio L’animal dans la decoration particularly featured these styles, focusing on plant and animal forms, exciting asymmetry, playful patterns and joyful geometry. This was published at a time when pattern books had grown in popularity, offering inspiration and templates for textile designers to use for fabric. Although none of the textiles in this portfolio went into productions, his designs influenced other artists who did produces wallpapers and textiles. 

This book was republished in the late twentieth century due to the revival of interest in Art Nouveau. In fact, the Art Nouveau style is intimately associated with interior design and even narrowed the gap between fine and applied art. Art Nouveau artists believed that the mass production as a result of booming industry produced poor quality products and instead prioritised good workmanship, instead raising the status of craft to create works of art that were both modern and useful. Verneuil’s prints are recognisably Art Nouveau, featuring flowing natural forms, muted colours as well as motion and contours. They also share many features of Art Nouveau’s successor, Art Deco, which was less focused on the uniqueness of handmade objects but were more focused on creating aesthetically appealing machine-made objects that were available to all. 

Verneuil’s repetitive, geometric, and highly stylised works encapsulate the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements in both fashion and function.