Visual & Decorative Arts Blog

Art Nouveau artist Louis Comfort Tiffany was highly skilled in jewellery design, ceramics, enamels, and metalwork but he is best known for his beautiful stained-glass designs. Using opalescent glass in a variety of colours and textures, he created a stunning range of jewel-like Art Nouveau works.

Have you opened the first few doors in your advent calendar yet? As of last Sunday, December 1^st, 2013, the Christmas season will have officially begun. Children and adults alike will begin the celebration together, as they pull out their traditional advent calendars and begin the countdown to Christmas Day. Though they grace our walls and fill our mornings with the opening a new door each time we wake, the origins of the calendar remain a mystery to the average individual. If you fall under this category, look no further! You are about to become well versed in the tradition of the advent calendar.

Gustav Klimt is one of the most popular and celebrated art nouveau artists. His works are instantly recognisable and his golden paintings, such as the incredibly popular The Kiss, are perfect for our beautifully foiled luxury notebooks and iphone cases. Here's some background information on the man himself as well as a more in-depth look at The Kiss.

Our art calendars have been taking a lot of my focus recently, and today I've been working on our Illuminated Manuscripts wall calendar for 2015. (Yes I know, we're looking that far ahead already!) Having just seen how beautifully the 2014 calendar has turned out, we decided there was too much scope not to do it again for 2015 (and we didn't need much persuading). The artwork is stunning, and the history behind them is just as fascinating.

A whole world of merchandise and media, from art calendars to coffee cups and T-shirts to an actual theme park ('Moomin World' in Western Finland), has built up around children's favourites The Moomins – our hippopotamus-like friends really are a treasure trove for the art of fine gifts. I remember watching these eclectic characters and their adventures in Moominvalley in a cartoon series back in the 1990s. But of course they go further back than this, back to Tove Jansson's original novels, the first of which was published in 1945 in Swedish by Schildts publishers.

Throughout his life Van Gogh wrote many letters to his friends, family and fellow artists. In these letters he often discussed his own artworks, and one such example regards Van Gogh’s 1888 oil painting The Bedroom, which he discusses in a letter to his brother Theo, shown below:

Tamara de Lempicka was one of the most celebrated, and notorious art deco artists. Born in Poland in 1898 she lived in Russia before escaping the Russian Revolution to settle in Paris in the late 1917. Once installed she embarked on a series of paintings that guaranteed her a place in the glamorous society of 1920s Europe and America.