The Months: Gardens of Art by Eugène Grasset

In 1894, Eugène Grasset (25 May 1845 – 23 October 1917) received a commission from the French department store La Belle Jardinière to create 12 original works of art to be used as a calendar.

Grasset’s woodcuts show women in fashionable costumes of the period each bearing a sign of the zodiac in the design. The women are in gardens, tending to the plants and flowers, which reflect the changing seasons. With blank spaces for the calendar dates, these works were compiled into a portfolio titled “Les Mois” (The Months) and published by the Parisian publisher G. de Malherbe in 1896.

We’ve pulled these lovely images together into a new version of this delightful calendar. You can order yours here. Also, if you want prints or cards of the whole set of indivudal months, we can make those, too. Just get in touch via our shop’s chatbox.

 

A precursor of the Art Nouveau style, Eugène Grasset trained as an architect in his native Switzerland and travelled to Egypt before settling in Paris in 1871. He worked in the applied and decorative arts producing designs for jewellery, furniture and stained glass.

It was not until 1894 that Grasset had his first and only one-man exhibition in his lifetime; a large retrospective of his work at the Salon des Cent, a gallery on the premises of La Plume magazine, a French bi-monthly literary and artistic review. The exhibition included drawings and watercolours, designs for furniture, stained glass, metalwork, fabric and jewellery, as well as theatrical and advertising posters, book and magazine covers, illustrations and other work as a graphic designer.

Inspired by Japanese art (which he had noted at the Exposition Universelle of 1878) as well as medieval art, Grasset published two important books on ornamental design; La plante et ses applications ornamentales, which appeared in 1898-1899, and Méthode de composition ornamental, published in 1905. He also contributed articles and reviews to the journals Revue des Arts Décoratifs and Art et Décoration, and between 1881 and his death in 1917 served as the highly influential Professor of Decorative Arts at the Ecole Normale d’Enseignement du Dessin. Large groups of drawings, designs, studies and sketches by Grasset are today in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.