French Multiples

Anonymous French Printmaker
Montgolfier Balloon
1783
hand-colored engraving
National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC

Anonymous French Printmaker
Nous jurons de faire baisser la Toile
(textile merchants as parody of Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii)
ca. 1785
hand-colored engraving
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Printmaker
Winged Geniuses flanking Urn
ca. 1790
block-printed wallpaper dado
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Griffins
ca. 1800-1820
block-printed wallpaper dado
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Balusters
ca. 1820-25
block-printed wallpaper dado
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Balusters
ca. 1820-30
block-printed wallpaper dado
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Interlacing Garlands
ca. 1825-40
block-printed and flocked wallpaper border
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Arcaded Stage Scene
ca. 1835-45
block-printed and stenciled wallpaper frieze
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Scrolls alternating with Flowers
ca. 1850
block-printed wallpaper border
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Pattern of Tassels
ca. 1860-70
block-printed wallpaper border
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Air France
1947
lithograph and screenprint (poster)
National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC

Anonymous French Designer
On Vous Intoxique!
1968
screenprint (poster)
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Shopping Bag from Brunschwig & Fils, Paris
ca. 1970
offset-print on paper bag
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Shopping Bag from Rodier, Paris
ca. 1975
offset-print on paper bag
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Shopping Bag from Yves Saint-Laurent, Paris
ca. 1979
offset-print on paper bag
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Ateliers Adultes & Enfants
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris
ca. 1980
offset-lithograph (poster)
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Insaisissable Sagan
2024
digital advertising graphic
Classiques Garnier, Paris

13 May 1948

    I dreamt I was at a point on Southborough Common which yet was vaguely like the Green outside the West Door of Westminster Abbey, just where the gate opens into Dean's Yard.

    Some tall monument, a sort of pillar clamped with iron to a flat, rather thin base, was about to be demolished by a gang of workmen.  I asked a bystander why it was to be destroyed, and he answered in one of those commonplace, indifferent voices: "Oh, it's not very old, only early Victorian, and it was put up by mistake; besides, it's very ugly."

    I was angry at the wanton destruction and thought the monument not at all ugly.  I wanted to get close to it, so that I could read the inscription, in large Roman capitals, on either side of the base.  But even as I tried to do this a gorilla of a navvy in a very old-fashioned red cap shouted out roughly that the pillar was about to be blown up.  He was chewing all the time, and he spat constantly, a very wet saliva, as if his mouth were full of water.

    All at once something was placed at the base of the column, the workmen tugged on a rope tied to the top, the pillar both blew up and was slapped down by the men with the rope.  I thought that one of the men had been trapped in the collapse, he seemed to be wriggling about in the ruins; then I saw him run out and join the crowd. 

    I was furious and sorry.  I thought, "They've pulled it down now, they've had their imbecile destructive way.  What will they start on next?"

– from The Journals of Denton Welch (who was born in 1915, gravely injured in 1935, then wrote the journals between 1942 and his early death in 1948), edited by Michael De-la-Noy (1984)