Japanese Ornament in the Decorative Arts

The highly sophisticated traditional arts of Japan are synonymous with perfection. Every line, shape and colour as well as the arrangement of all elements as a whole is always ideal. Especially the representation of nature in all its forms expresses a refined sensitivity of the Japanese awareness of nature’s transience, which conveys beauty with underlying poetry.
The Japanese decorative arts, be it e.g. metalwork, lacquer, ceramics or textile fabrics, always make up an exquisite composition of artistic abundance and restraint.

Japanese Ornament in the Decorative Arts is a carefully gathered collection of ornamentation from precious 19th and early 20th century portfolios, an era in which the decorative arts have had in Europe a strong revival and many impressing source books were produced. Their plates are beautiful polychrome lithographies, using sometimes even gold and silver in the reproduction of the images of classic ornament.

Unlike the tightly packed plates of these lavish paper editions (in which each plate is a compilation of several patterns), modern digital publications allow a much more open layout.

Bitedition wanted each ornament to attract the attention it deserves and therefore displays in the present pattern book each faithfully reproduced motif on one single age.

With more than 400 royalty-free designs and illustrations of different size the e-book Japanese Ornament in the Decorative Arts offers to students and artists, professional designers and arts-craftsmen, historians and architects as well as simple amateurs of ornamentation and decoration the ultimate image bank of Japanese ornament.