In the 1920s, as photography and fast rotary presses flooded Paris with cheap color, a small circle of designers went the other way: back to hand-cut stencils and a brush. Some of the most dazzling results were the butterfly and insect plates of Emile-Allain Séguy.

E.A. Séguy (1877–1951) was a French designer of patterns and textiles drawn from the natural world. His work sits at a rare crossroads: the flowing, organic line of Art Nouveau, which peaked around 1900, and the bold, faceted geometry of 1920s Art Deco. Few artists blended the two as convincingly.

Over his career he published eleven portfolios of designs, including butterflies, beetles, flowers, foliage, crystals, and animals. They were meant as source books, giving the makers of textiles and wallpaper a jolt of color and pattern to work from.

01 — The methodWhat is pochoir?

Pochoir is simply French for "stencil." Stenciling was an old decorative trade, used for borders and wall ornament, usually in flat, crude patches of color outlined by the cutout itself.

In early 20th-century Paris, printers refined it into a fine-art process. They laid color over color, often on top of a lithograph, woodcut, wood engraving, or etching. The revival was a direct response to machine printing, whose color reproductions looked flat and muddy. A hand-laid layer of gouache had a depth and glow that no camera or press could match.

The field's handbook arrived in 1925: Jean Saudé's Traité d'enluminure d'art au pochoir, which did much to spread the technique.

02 — Layer by layerHow a print was built

03 — The luxury printFashion's favorite medium

Done entirely by hand, pochoir was slow and expensive, and that suited the luxury press perfectly. From the early 1900s through the Jazz Age it filled the pages of elite fashion journals. Every print was inspected and approved before it left the studio.

Designers such as George Barbier and Sonia Delaunay issued their costume and textile designs as lustrous pochoir folios. Bespoke furniture makers, wallpaper houses, and architects used it for catalogs aimed at very wealthy clients.

04 — The insectsNature as industrial designer

Séguy's plates take iridescent beetles, moths, and dragonflies and arrange them into dense, jewel-toned patterns. His brightly colored geometric designs were meant to inspire textiles and wallpaper. He wanted to bring to decorative artists the exotic creatures they had overlooked simply because they were rare in life and in illustration.

Butterflies, he knew, would be an easy sell. The other insects needed a defense. In his view they were built like wonderful machines and deserved the same admiration as an airplane fuselage, an ocean liner, or a locomotive.

"Nature was a successful industrial designer!"

— Dover Publications, on Séguy's vision

05 — Beyond the bugsFlowers, fish & pure rhythm

Séguy's eye went well past insects. Portfolios such as Floréal and the bilingual Suggestions for Stuffs and Carpets offered blooms, foliage, koi, and swirling abstractions, all stenciled in pochoir and meant to be lifted straight onto silks, upholstery, and rugs.

06 — LegacyA century later

Dover Publications later reissued the plates as Séguy's Decorative Butterflies and Insects in Full Color, keeping the work in circulation for new generations of designers. That is a big reason his butterflies still turn up on textiles, wallpaper, and prints today, and why his hand-stenciled color still looks startlingly modern.