Introduction

On 20 March 1886, The Times newspaper reviewed a ‘handsome folio volume of designs’ called Fifteenth Century Italian Ornament: chiefly taken from brocades and stuffs found in the National Gallery. The author was a young architect and art collector called Sydney Vacher (1854–1935). His aim was to create the first sourcebook of ‘the exquisite ornament that was seen on materials of everyday use in the fifteenth century’ from expertly executed paintings in the National Gallery. Pattern books were incredibly popular at the time, feeding the Victorian craze for historic revivals of Gothic, Egyptian, Greek and Renaissance style. This Moleskine twin-set tells the story behind the inspiration and production of Vacher’s book, and for the first time displays twenty of the paintings alongside his patterns. In addition to this, the set includes a pack of memo cards featuring Vacher’s patterns on the reverse