Media: Grammar of Ornament Part Two

Today, we continue posting the color plates from a 1910 printing of the first comprehensive book on design, Owen Jones's "The Grammar of Ornament". For our first collection of images, see Grammar of Ornament Part One,

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GENERAL PRINCIPLES IN THE ARRANGEMENT OF FORM AND COLOR IN ARCHITECTURE AND THE DECORATIVE ARTS, WHICH ARE ADVOCATED THROUGHOUT THIS WORK

Proposition 1: The Decorative Arts arise from, and should properly be attendant upon, Architecture.

Proposition 2: Architecture is the material expression of the wants, the faculties, and the sentiments, of the age in which it is created.

Proposition 3: As Architecture, so all works of the Decorative Arts, should possess fitness, proportion, harmony, the result of all which is repose.

Proposition 4: True beauty results from that repose which the mind feels when the eye, the intellect, and the affections, are satisfied from the absence of any want.

ASSYRIAN AND PERSIAN ORNAMENT







GENERAL PRINCIPLES (cont)

Proposition 5: Construction should be decorated. Decoration should never be purposely constructed. That which is beautiful is true; that which is true must be beautiful.

Proposition 6: Beauty of form is produced by lines growing out one from the other in gradual undulations; there are no excrescences; nothing could be removed and leave the design equally good or better.

Proposition 7: The general forms being first cared for, these should be subdivided and ornamented by general lines; the interstices may then be filled in with ornament, which again may be subdivided and enriched for closer inspection.

GREEK ORNAMENT





GENERAL PRINCIPLES (cont)

Proposition 8: All ornament should be based on a geometrical construction.

Proposition 9: As in every perfect work of Architecture, a true proportion will be found to reign between all the members which compose it, so throughout the Decorative Arts ever assemblage of forms should be arranged on certain definite proportions; the whole and each particular member should be a multiple of some simple unit. Those proportions will be the most beautiful which it will be most difficult for the eye to detect.

Proposition 10: Harmony of form consists in the proper balanceing, and contrast of, the straight, the inclined, and the curved.









GENERAL PRINCIPLES (cont)

Proposition 11: In surface decoration all lines should flow out of a perfect stem. Every ornament, however distant, should be traced to its branch and root. (Oriental practice)

Proposition 12: All junctions of curved lines with curved or of curved lines with straight should be tangential to each other. (Natural law)

Proposition 13: Flowers or other natural objects should not be used as ornaments, but conventional representations founded upon them sufficiently suggestive to convey the intended image to the mind, without destroying the unity of the object they are employed to decorate. (Universally obeyed in the best periods of Art, equally violated when Art declines.)





GENERAL PRINCIPLES (cont)

Proposition 14: Colour is used to assist in the development of form, and to distinguish objects or parts of objects one from another.

Proposition 15: Colour is used to assist light and shade, helping the undulations of form by the proper distribution of the several colours.

Proposition 16: Those objects are best attained by the use of the primary colours on small surfaces and in small quantities, balanced and supported by the secondary and tertiary colours on the larger masses.

Proposition 17: The primary colours should be used on the upper portions of objects, the secondary and tertiary on the lower.

POMPEIAN ORNAMENT







GENERAL PRINCIPLES (cont)

Proposition 18: The primaries of equal intensities will harmonise or neutralise each other, in the proportions of 3 yellow, 5 red, and 8 blue- integrally as 16. The secondaries in the proportions of 8 orange, 13 purple, 11 green- integrally as 32. The tertiaries, citrine (compound of orange and green) 19, russet (orange and purple) 21, olive (green and purple) 24- integrally as 64.

Proposition 19: When a full colour is contrasted with another of a lower tone, the volume of the latter must be proportionally incerased.

Proposition 20: When a primary tinged with another primary is contrasted with a secondary, the secondary must have a hue of the third primary.

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For more beautiful designs from this amazing book, see Grammar of Ornament Part One and Part Three.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
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ASIFA-Hollywood
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