PlummerZine

It’s 1914. and Orientalism meets Art Nouveau and the early stirrings of Art Deco in Emile-Allain Séguy’s “Samarkande: 20 Compositions en couleurs dans le Style oriental”.

Another wonderful series of plates by turn of the century French design guru, Emile-Allain Séguy. Made just before WW1, in...

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Nature Travel

William Morris. Strawberry Thief . “You can picture my Father going out in the early morning and watching the rascally thrushes at work on the fruit beds…”

Perhaps the most recognizable of Morris’s textiles, Strawberry Thief celebrates the thrushes in Kelmscott Manor’s garden. May Morris remarked, “You can picture...

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Nature

Emile-Allain Séguy saw in butterflies “un monde somptueux de formes et de couleurs” (a world of sumptuous forms and colors) and he brought that world to vivid life in Papillons (1925).

Emile-Allain Séguy described the illustrations in one of his best-known collections, Papillons (1925), as “un monde somptueux de formes et de...

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Nature

AIRSCAPES of CALIFORNIA. Otherworldly 1920s aerial photography by U.S. government pilots.

Nature

The 1920s French Art Deco influencer who drew pure design inspiration from the natural world. Insectes (1929) by Émile-Allain Séguy.

Emile-Allain Séguy was a French Art Deco style leader and his Insectes (1929), like Papillons (1925) and Prismes: 40 Planches de Dessins...

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Nature

The Swiss artist, Ernst Kreidolf (1863-1956). A Princess helped him give up the life of a farmer to put his faith and future in the hands of the flower fairies. He lived magically ever after.

Once upon a time there was a boy with a really long name. Konrad Ernst Theophil Kreidolf (known as Ernst)...

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Nature

William Sharp’s sumptuous 1854 illustrations of The Great Water Lily of America, the “vegetable wonder” that owes it’s life to scarab beetles, has 10 foot wide leaves and flowers that smell of fruit.

The Victoria Regia; or the Great Water Lily of America, a gigantic water lily, was first discovered along the Amazon...

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Art & Design Nature

Æolididae e famiglie affini del porto di Genova & Bologna. Salvatore Trinchese, the man who fell in love with a certain sea slug.

Æolididae are a family of sea slugs, marine gastropod molluscs without shells. Most of them feed on sea anemones and...

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Nature

The forgotten Finska Vyer birch bark album, by I.K Inha, 1892. Inside are raw natural landscape photographs of Finland. It won the 1st international photographic competion in Paris.

This wonderful object, a photo album entitled, Finska Vyer (Finnish Views) was created by 2 men in 1892. The photographs...

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Nature

The natural world, ancient Egypt, Meso-America and Japan. The Art Deco designer, Emile-Allain Séguy really mixed it all up in his series, “Prismes: 40 Planches de Dessins et Coloris Nouveaux” (1931).

Prismes: 40 Planches de Dessins et Coloris Nouveaux (Prisms: 40 Plates of Designs and New Colors), was chock full of...

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Nature

The incredible, psychedelic tropical fish fantasy of Louis Renard & Samuel Fallours : 1719’s Natural history of the rarest curiosities of the Indian Sea.

Histoire naturelle des plus rares curiositez de la mer des Indes (1719), is one of the very earliest colour publications...

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Nature

Colour plates from 1916’s “The main poisonous snakes of the Dutch East Indies by Pieter Antonie Ouwens : With a treatise on the phenomena and on the treatment of poisonous snakebite by Dr. G.W. Kiewait the Younger”.

Nature