55th Annual Delaware Show

“The Very Quintessence of Fashion”: George Wyon, Composition Ornament, and Design Books at Winterthur By Elizabeth Humphrey TheWinterthur Library is well known for its extensive collection of design books. One such volume is a recently acquired trade catalogue of composition ornament whose densely packed pages fill the viewer’s imagination with illustrations of rosettes, swags, decorative bands, and plaster tablets evoking baroque, rococo, and neoclassical styles (fig. 1). The yellowed, weathered pages of the catalogue contain “forty-three engraved plates, eight original ink and gouache drawings, printed price sheets,” and original designs from two eighteenth-century British firms: Jee, Eginton & Co. and Jaques and Son. 1 The illustrations include a variety of composition ornament designs similar to decorative elements on objects throughout the museum. If you look closely, you will find those motifs everywhere ― on mantels, archways, doorways, and even furniture. Like so many of Winterthur’s design books, the composition ornament catalogue highlights the influence of global design on American decorative arts and provides a valuable resource for understanding the many treasures in the museum collection. Fig. 1. Decorative motifs from George Wyon’s trade catalogue of composition ornament (Birmingham, ca. 1785). Winterthur Library NK1530 W99 TC PF — 107 —