Two Pugin Gothic Revival Designs, Stove and Carpets, Antique Pair, 1852

About this sheet

This is a set of two original sheets sold together, two antique chromolithographs of 1852. Both record designs by A. W. N. Pugin shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and both were published on the same day. The first shows a tall stove designed by Pugin and made by John Hardman of Birmingham, a cage of pierced Gothic tracery enclosing rows of panels glazed in cream, green and gold under a crocketed and pinnacled canopy, drawn standing in the corner of a room against a Pugin wallpaper and a tiled floor. The second shows two carpets designed by Pugin and made by the Crace firm of London, a square panel on a brown ground filled with quatrefoils, fleurs de lis and stylized foliage in red, blue and green inside a broad blue border, and below it a strip of a deep blue carpet strewn with gold rosettes above a running floral border.

Both sheets come from The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century, Matthew Digby Wyatt's record of the Great Exhibition of 1851, published in London by Day and Son, lithographers to the Queen, between 1851 and 1853 and dedicated by permission to Prince Albert. The work was issued to subscribers in forty parts in printed paper wrappers, and the two volumes together carry about a hundred and sixty large folio plates. The project came from the publishers, who approached Wyatt soon after the exhibition opened wanting to show, on a large scale, what color printing could do for industrial education. Chromolithography was then new and costly, and each color on a sheet was printed from its own stone. Francis Bedford, John Sleigh, John Alfred Vinter and their colleagues drew and lithographed the plates under Wyatt's direction, and every plate carries its own imprint and date.

Pugin died in September 1852 and both of these sheets were published a month later, so the pair appeared just after his death. Hardman was Pugin's metalworker and Crace his decorator, and between them they executed much of his metalwork and decoration, including the furnishings of the Medieval Court at the Crystal Palace and of the Palace of Westminster. Sold apart, each sheet is one Pugin design among many. Sold together they show the two trades that made his work, and they hang as a matched pair in identical frames above a chest, a sideboard or a stair, one upright beside the other.

Two sheets, both age toned, plate 108 the browner and darker along its upper and left edges. A few small foxing spots in the margins of plate 106 and minor nicks along its left edge. Light corner wear on both. Both printed images are clean.

These are original antique prints, not modern reproductions. This item is sold unframed. Any framed or interior images are shown for presentation and inspiration only, unless the listing explicitly states that the item is sold framed.