JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 867

This may well be the very first book illustrated in the
style known as Art Nouveau–Arthur Mackmurdo’s
Wren’s City Churches—coming a dozen
years before the revolutionary Gismonda poster of Alphonse Mucha. The 1895
poster by Mucha caused an enormous stir, so much so that this style, which would
be known shortly thereafter as Art
Nouveau, was initially known as Style
Mucha.  But that didn’t stick; Art Nouveau and Jugendstil did. 

Where does this leave the 1883 breakthrough design by multi-talented
designer-architect arts-and-crafts-inspired Mackmurdo?  His design for the Wren certainly has the
pathology of Nouveau and stands far apart from the very sedimented regulatory
aspects of the Grande Ecole schools of the day: 
flowing, organic, deeply stylized, intuitively suggestive.  Mackmurdo’s title page is lovely, curvilinear
and simple:  its main base are three
flowers with 21 leaves, bounded by two birds (chickens, perhaps but certainly
not wrens), and fills the requirements of the new style.  Except there wasn’t a new style yet, not for
years to come; Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851-1942) was out there well ahead of
the curve, and seems to have been out there all by himself.