Exposition générale des beaux-arts : catalogue explicatif
This is a catalogue explicatif issued in Brussels in 1893 by the Exposition générale des beaux-arts, a printed guide to a Belgian fine-arts exhibition. The pictures are small decorative printer's ornaments, not exhibition plates. Each shows a cartouche or shield framed by scrolling foliage, flowers and ribbons, with a central emblem such as a lion, a winged lion, a winged figure with a book, or a Mercury-like head with a herald's trumpet. A designer could take from them the symmetrical cartouche layout, the ribbon-and-scroll borders and the 1890s classicising emblem vocabulary for headers, dividers and frames.
