These rare and stunning 19th cenury volumes, illustrating the beauty of Gothic architectural ornament, suceed overwhelmingly in the authors ambitions to present “such a number of examples of foliage and other ornamental details of the different styles” of English Architecture,” as clearly to elucidate the characteristic features peculiar to each period, and drawn sufficiently large in scale to be practically useful in facilitating the labours of the architect and artist.”

These books are truly amazing – if you are a fan of Gothic architecture or of architectural drawing, you should really check them out. The gold and colour are absolutely stunning but I think I actually prefer the uncolored plates:

I’m especially loving the various creatures / gargoyles – wouldn’t it be cool if we could see the employment of this type of ornament in the buildings of today? The amazing thing, for me, about these – and all of the illustrations I will be posting here, is that they are all in the ‘public domain’ in other words, they are totally copyright free. In future posts, I’m going to be talking a little more about how and where you can obtain these images online (dont expect to just google it and find what you are looking for – one big mistake people make is to assume that the first few pages of results on a Google search is the entire sum of information on any given topic available on the web – WRONG!!).

I’m also going to be giving you some tips on how you can make some money with freely available public domain material.

If you would like to see more of the Gothic Ornaments volumes please click HERE