Les Fleurs Crimson Paper Party Plate

The Les Fleurs paper plates place vintage botanical illustrations against hand-marbled grounds in the tradition of the finest French decorated papers: roses and open-faced blooms rendered with the careful draftsmanship of a 19th-century horticultural plate, set against the fluid, unrepeatable patterns of marbled paper in warm crimson, magenta, and gold. The combination is not decorative in the ordinary sense. It is a collision of two serious 19th-century traditions, each demanding precision of a different kind, producing something that looks equally at home on a formal table and a garden lunch.

The floral illustrations in the Les Fleurs collection are drawn from vintage botanical sources: the carefully observed, meticulously rendered studies produced for horticultural journals and scientific publications across the 19th century, at a moment when the documentation of plant species was considered work of genuine intellectual importance. These were not decorative illustrations. They were records, made by trained hands, of specific plants observed at close range over time.

The marbled grounds are drawn from the tradition of the finest 19th-century bookbinders: hand-pulled patterns in which pigment floated on size produces the characteristic cellular, fluid forms that no two pulls replicate exactly. Together on a plate, the precision of the botanical and the controlled accident of the marbling produce a surface worth looking at between courses. Available in 9″ dinner and 7″ salad or dessert sizes.