Album of Ornamental Detail: Drawings, Stencils and Photographs

Artists

Description

Album with black-cloth-covered cardboard covers; leather-covered spine and corners. White silked paper (treated with clay to resemble silk) endpapers. Twenty-seven pages of off-white cardboard. Contents: Commercial photographs printed by Spanish companies of the interior of the Alhambra, with details of tile work; ornamental designs based on and related to the designs at the Alhambra; designs for stencils, actual stencils cut from cardboard, and designs printed on textured paper from a stencil; sketches of fountains from South Kensington Gardens and Rouen as well as capitals, lintels, pedestals, and other architectural details from Italy and Granada. A section of the second page has been cut away, perhaps so that a drawing on tracing paper affixed to that page could be laid over a drawing mounted on the next.It is not clear who assembled this album, but it may have been arranged by the artist as a source book of decorative motifs and ornament used in working out aspects of the Boston Public Library project.

Dimensions

54.7 x 71.5 x 3.2 cm (21 9/16 x 28 1/8 x 1 1/4 in.) page: 53.2 x 67.5 cm (20 15/16 x 26 9/16 in.)

Provenance

To the artist's sisters, Violet (Mrs. Francis) Ormond and Emily Sargent, at his death, 1925; gift of Mrs. Ormond to the Fogg Art Museum, 1937.