Repeating patterns by Jones, Voysey, and Furuya Kōrin

A pattern plate is drawn so the unit can repeat, across cloth, paper, or a wall. Pattern books were printed for other makers: a page of borders, a wallpaper sample, a textile design. Three of those books are here.

Owen Jones, Greek No. 2

Owen Jones published The Grammar of Ornament in 1856 as a guide to how historic ornament was built. He had traveled in Greece, Egypt, Turkey, and Spain, and the book also gathers styles from other collections. It was printed by chromolithography. The sheet below is from an 1865 edition. The heading on the plate is Greek No. 2: a page of palmette and anthemion borders, in black on an ochre ground.

C. F. A. Voysey for Essex & Co.

Charles Francis Annesley Voysey designed flat, repeating papers in the 1890s, often birds and plants reduced to a few shapes. The file below is from an Essex & Co. sample book dated 1893, the years he was designing wallpapers for that firm. What you see is a border: a shell or fan, a small leaf, and a row of dots, printed on red paper. The rest of the sheet is the blank sample.

Furuya Kōrin, Shin bijutsukai

In Kyoto, design books called zuan were made as models for weavers, dyers, and other makers. Furuya Kōrin (1875–1910) published Shin bijutsukai in 1902. He took the name Kōrin from the painter Ogata Kōrin. The plate below is a color woodblock: a hanging vine with heart-shaped leaves, in maroon, olive, and pale yellow, on a black ground.

Jones died in 1874 and Furuya Kōrin in 1910. Voysey died in 1941, and these 1893 samples are in the public domain. The downloads are page images from the Internet Archive. You can use them for fabric, paper, packaging, or a new design of your own.