Demonstrating Ornament: Teaching through Drawing

From 1834 to 1850, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc taught a course in the history and composition of ornament at the École royale gratuite de dessin, Paris. He used a teaching system involving drawing demonstrations in which he analyzed the origins of motifs from the past, then invited his students to compose for themselves. The concept of training the intellect before the hand had its start in the revision undertaken by Jean-Hilaire Belloc, the school’s director beginning in 1831. Viollet-le-Duc's demonstrations were spectacular performances during which he executed large motifs with a brush; few traces of these courses remain in the archives, unfortunately, but the approach resonates in his later thinking about the teaching of drawing as the language useful in every profession. Long before he published his Histoire d’un dessinateur (History of a designer: how one learns to draw, 1879), this early experience enabled him to think through the role he assigned to drawing in the training of children to become craftspeople or industrial designers.