Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine

Alice Cordelia Morse|William Hamilton Gibson|Harper & Brothers

1891 · Green cloth over boards with gold decoration · Drawings and Prints

A leading New York book-cover designer in the late nineteenth century, Morse studied at the Woman’s Art School of the Cooper Union, then under John La Farge before working for Louis C. Tiffany as a painter and designer of stained glass. In 1887 she began to concentrate on book-covers, fufilling eighty-three commissions for New York commercial publishers by 1905. Complementing the text, she chose imagery ranging from classical, to Renaissance, Celtic, Arabic, Gothic, Rococo, Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau. This example is bound in green diagonal-rib cloth, gold-stamped with a linear Art Nouveau style design of intertwined naturalistic cornflowers.

Artist

Alice Cordelia Morse|William Hamilton Gibson|Harper & Brothers

Date

1891

Medium

Green cloth over boards with gold decoration

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

Gift of Alice C. Morse, 1923, transferred from the Library