Maurice Pillard Verneuil: Art Nouveau Designs & Art Prints

Who Was Maurice Pillard Verneuil?

Maurice Pillard Verneuil, often written M. P. Verneuil, was a decorative artist, illustrator, teacher and writer. He did not paint easel pictures for the Salon. He made patterns: for wallpaper, printed cotton, silk, stained glass, carved wood, wrought iron, enamel, jewellery and ceramic tiles. His books showed designers and manufacturers how to study a flower or an animal from life and then simplify it into ornament, and they are why his name lives on. Our Maurice Pillard Verneuil art prints come straight from those books.

How to spot a Verneuil plate:

1. Study and pattern side by side: a plant or animal drawn from life, then reused as a wallpaper, border or fabric on the same sheet, as in the wisteria patterns.
2. Flat colour with a firm outline: soft greens, ochres, slate blues, rusts and creams, laid on like a woodblock print.
3. Repeats that run off the page: birds, fish and leaves set in rhythmic rows and diagonals, like his flying fish over waves.
4. Unusual animals: not only lions and eagles but bats, snails, stag beetles, frogs, ermines and kangaroos.
5. The monogram: a small “MPV” in a circle or square, or a printed “M. P. Verneuil”, near a corner of the plate.

From Saint-Quentin to Grasset’s Studio

Maurice Pillard was born on 29 April 1869 in Saint-Quentin, a textile town in the Aisne in northern France. “Verneuil” was added to his name later, and French records often call him Maurice Pillard, dit Verneuil. After the lycée in Saint-Quentin he wanted an art training, but his family was cautious, and in 1888 he entered the architecture section of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he stayed for three years.

In 1892 he joined the École normale d’enseignement du dessin, the Paris school often called the École Guérin, to study decorative composition with Eugène Grasset. Grasset, a Swiss-born designer of posters, stained glass and type, taught that ornament should grow from the close study of nature. Verneuil became one of his favourite pupils, won first prize in the school’s competition and learned enamelling and other crafts largely on his own.

When Grasset published La Plante et ses applications ornementales in 1896, a portfolio of plant studies each paired with designs for wallpaper, fabric and objects, most of the plates were drawn by Verneuil. Several of our plant prints carry the date 1896, such as the poppy and the thistle, and look like plates from that book.

He also made posters. For the magazine Le Monde moderne, published by the Maison Quantin, he designed three, including our Le Monde moderne poster for May, and in April 1897 he drew the cover of the art review L’Image. His posters belong to the same Paris years as those of Alphonse Mucha, Jules Chéret and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and among his collaborators was the Symbolist painter Armand Point.

Art et Décoration and the Teaching Years

In 1897 a new Paris magazine, Art et Décoration, set out to champion the modern decorative arts, with Grasset on its editorial team. Verneuil drew for it from the first year, designed its covers and title pages and, by the count of design historian Midori Hirose, wrote 118 articles for it up to 1926. Next to L’Art décoratif it was one of the main voices of Art Nouveau in France, and it was read by designers across Europe.

His articles often took one kind of creature at a time and showed how to observe and then simplify it: insects in 1904, fish in 1905, birds in 1907 and butterflies in 1909. The same method runs through plates such as his dragonflies and butterflies among bulrushes. In 1909 he wrote about Japanese textile stencils, and in 1910 a three-part series on the sea.

Around 1903 he showed furniture, lamps, jewellery and interior fittings with La Poignée, a loose group of nine decorative artists who exhibited together in Paris. From 1904 he advertised his own studio, where he taught the theory and practice of decorative design. One of his pupils was the young Amédée Ozenfant, later a founder of Purism with Le Corbusier. Verneuil also published teaching books, among them Cours pratique de composition décorative and the border collection 250 Bordures, which Grasset introduced.

L’Animal dans la Décoration

L’Animal dans la décoration was Verneuil’s first pattern book and is still his best known. The first part, six plates, came out on 15 November 1897; the full work ran to ten parts and 60 colour lithograph plates, all drawn by Verneuil and published in Paris by the Librairie centrale des beaux-arts. Our collection holds 60 prints from it, which our animal art prints shoppers often find first.

Grasset’s introduction set out the argument. French ornament, he wrote, kept using the same few animals, the eagle, the lion and the dolphin’s head, while fish, mice, owls and snakes had dropped out of design. He blamed the taste for realism that had taken over since the Renaissance, and pointed to medieval art and to Japan as models for simplifying animal forms so that they sit well on a wall or a cloth.

The plates answer him. Each sheet usually gives a large study of an animal in its setting, such as Écureuils, red squirrels in an oak, Cerfs, stags among birches, Coqs et poules or Hermines vulgaires, or a sheet of several applications, each labelled with its use: papier peint (wallpaper), bordure (border), tenture (wall hanging), vitrail (stained glass), émail cloisonné, carved wood or wrought iron. The animals range from the familiar to the exotic: snails, stag beetles and frogs, peacocks and parrots, cockatoos, tigers and even a kangaroo border.

The book travelled far. Hirose found that the design department of the Kyoto Higher School of Arts and Crafts used its plates as copying models in the late Meiji period; a student’s careful copy from 1910 survives in the collection of what is now the Kyoto Institute of Technology. A French book shaped by Japanese art had come home to Japan.

Verneuil and Japanese Art

Japanese art was the other teacher in Verneuil’s studio. He built a large collection of Japanese objects and printed books, and according to his family some pieces had belonged to the writers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt and to the Paris dealer Hayashi Tadamasa, the two great channels of Japanese art into France. Like many artists of his generation he admired the way Katsushika Hokusai and other Japanese artists drew small creatures with care and humour, and Japanese design books of the same decades, such as those of Kōno Bairei, show the same love of birds, insects and flowers.

Hirose has traced some of his motifs to Japanese pattern books of the 1880s in his own collection. The bats in Chauves-souris et pavots echo a bat design in Kondō Seitarō’s Bankō hinagata gafu (1886), and a shoal of fish in L’Animal dans la décoration follows tatewaku, the old Japanese pattern of rising, wavy lines. What he borrowed, she argues, was less the subjects than the system: how a motif is repeated on a triangle, a diamond or a diagonal grid.

You can see it in Poissons volants et vagues, where orange flying fish leap through curling blue waves, and in peacocks in rowan trees stencilled across a sheet like a kimono fabric. In 1910 he published Étoffes japonaises tissées et brochées, about 200 photographs of Japanese woven textiles from the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris, the South Kensington Museum in London, the textile museum in Lyon and private collections. In the early 1920s he and his wife travelled through Southeast Asia and on to Japan, and in 1927 he wrote a book on the temples of Java. Browse our Japanese art prints to hang his sources beside him.

Étude de la Plante: Verneuil’s Plant Studies

Plants fill more than half of our collection: 100 prints. They follow the method Verneuil learned from Grasset. First comes a clear botanical study of one plant, with its leaves, flowers, buds and seed heads drawn separately and named, like Iris germanique, Grenadier, the pomegranate or the lady’s slipper orchid Cypripedium roezlii. Then come sheets of the same plant turned into wallpapers, friezes, fabrics and borders, which our store lists with numbers, such as Glycine 3.

Some of these plates likely come from Grasset’s La Plante et ses applications ornementales of 1896, which Verneuil largely drew; others from his own Étude de la plante: son application aux industries d’art, dated 1903 on its title page (some catalogues give 1904). That book held around 380 plant illustrations and about 300 pages of text, all by Verneuil, and showed how a plant could be adapted for textiles, stained glass, metalwork and more. In 1905 he added a four-volume Encyclopédie artistique et documentaire de la plante, drawings and photographs of plants through the seasons, made as a reference for designers.

The plants he chose are mostly common European ones: dandelion, buttercup, ivy, mistletoe, horse chestnut, oak, apple, columbine, lily of the valley, snowdrop and periwinkle, with a few garden exotics such as the snake’s head fritillary, the crown imperial and California poppy. Shop more in our botanical art prints.

One plant print stands apart: Cytises et digitales, a red-haired woman in a yellow flowered dress breathing in a spray of laburnum among pale pink foxgloves. It is one of the few Verneuil prints in our store with a human figure, and it shows how close his work could come to Mucha’s posters.

Combinaisons Ornementales: Ornament with a Mirror

Around 1901 Verneuil joined Alphonse Mucha and the poster artist and type designer Georges Auriol in an unusual book: Combinaisons ornementales se multipliant à l’infini à l’aide du miroir, ornamental combinations that multiply endlessly with the help of a mirror. Each small motif was drawn so that, with a hand mirror held against its edge, it could be doubled, reversed and turned into borders, corners and repeats.

The book had 60 plates printed in three colours, and the designs are marked with their author’s monogram. Verneuil drew 37 of them, more than half, against Mucha’s 12 and Auriol’s 11. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a copy, and a Dover reprint of 1974 brought it back to designers. Our store has 35 of these plates, listed as “Abstract design based on…”, among them peacock feathers, swirls, seahorses, fish and lizards and butterflies and leaves. All are credited to Verneuil in our catalogue.

The Sea, Méheut and Kaléidoscope

From about 1910 Verneuil turned to the sea. He stayed at Roscoff in Brittany with the young painter Mathurin Méheut, sketching fish, shellfish, crabs, seaweed and shore, and in 1913 published Étude de la mer: faune et flore de la Manche et de l’Océan, with Verneuil’s text and most of the pictures by Méheut. Sea life was already in his earlier plates, from jellyfish in stained glass to coral and starfish on printed cotton.

In 1926 came Kaléidoscope: ornements abstraits, 87 motifs in 20 pochoir (hand-stencilled) plates, made with his third wife, the painter Adélaïde Verneuil de Marval. The Met holds a full set. Its jagged, geometric patterns belong to Art Deco, and some critics see it as a late attempt to keep up with fashion; collectors today prize it. Our store does not carry Kaléidoscope plates. For a similar look, try the pochoir portfolios of E. A. Séguy or our Art Deco prints.

Switzerland, Death and Legacy

After the First World War Verneuil left Paris for Geneva, and from 1921 lived at Rivaz, a wine village above Lake Geneva in the canton of Vaud, with Adélaïde Verneuil de Marval (1898–1998), his third wife. In the 1930s she was the model for his photographic portfolio Images d’une femme. He died on 21 September 1942 at nearby Chexbres, aged seventy-three.

His family touched the Paris avant-garde: his daughter Suzanne married the Surrealist writer Philippe Soupault, and another daughter, Claudine, married the composer Manuel Rosenthal. But as tastes moved on from Art Nouveau his name faded. Nikolaus Pevsner left him out of The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design, and dictionaries gave him a few lines. The revival came through his books. Reprints, a 2000 monograph published with the Fondation Neumann in Switzerland, and Hirose’s research on his links with Japan have put him back beside Grasset and Mucha as one of the key designers of French Art Nouveau.

Famous Maurice Pillard Verneuil Designs

Ten plates to start with, all in our collection:

Cygne sauvage

L’Animal dans la décoration, 1897. White swans on a yellow bank among reeds, with more gliding on a sage-green lake behind. Calm and wide, ideal over a bed or sofa.

Écureuils

L’Animal dans la décoration, 1897. Red squirrels chasing through an oak against a lemon-yellow sky. His liveliest study plate.

Cerfs

L’Animal dans la décoration, 1897. A stag and hinds in a meadow edged by silver birches, in blues, greens and gold.

Paons dans les sorbiers

L’Animal dans la décoration, 1897. Blue peacocks in rowan trees as a stencil pattern, over a border of fish and seaweed.

Chauves-souris et pavots

L’Animal dans la décoration, 1897. Bats among pink poppies, with a wallpaper of butterflies and bellflowers. The motif Hirose traced to a Japanese pattern book.

Papillons

L’Animal dans la décoration, 1897. Dragonflies and swallowtail butterflies among bulrushes on a pale ground. A good pair with our butterfly prints.

Iris germanique

Plant study. Purple bearded irises with their sword-like leaves and a top view of the flower.

Grenadier

Plant study. Pomegranate branch, flower and fruit, whole, split and in cross section. A warm choice for a kitchen.

Peacock Feathers

Combinaisons ornementales, c. 1901. Peacock eyes turned into a border and sprays, made to be multiplied with a mirror.

Le Monde moderne

Poster, 1896. A red-haired woman with swans and irises, advertising the May issue of the magazine.

What Our Maurice Pillard Verneuil Prints Show

Plant studies and pattern sheets make up just over half the collection, followed by the 60 animal plates of L’Animal dans la décoration and 35 ornament designs from Combinaisons ornementales. The animal plates are the boldest in colour; the plant studies are the quietest and look best in sets of three or four, such as lilac, cyclamen and white lily.

How to Decorate with Maurice Pillard Verneuil Prints

• Living room: a wide animal plate such as Cygne sauvage or Cerfs gives a calm, colourful anchor over a sofa. Mix with our Art Nouveau prints.
• Kitchen or dining room: fruit and flower studies such as Grenadier, Pommier and Capucine hang well as a matched row.
• Bedroom: soft plant studies, Lis blanc or Glycine, in pale wood frames.
• Kids’ rooms: squirrels, rabbits, snails and swans: Écureuils and snails and gulls are cheerful and full of detail.
• Bathroom or hallway: sea plates such as flying fish and waves or jellyfish suit water and long walls.
• Gallery wall: combine a study plate with its pattern sheet, or frame four Combinaisons designs in a grid, with William Morris, Christopher Dresser or Owen Jones for a design-history wall.
• Frames and sizes: most plates are upright and roughly A4 in proportion; 12×16 to 18×24 inches with a cream mat shows the detail. Gold or oak frames echo the ochres and greens.

Frequently Asked Questions