THE CARE OF PICTURES AND PRINTS. 97 



V 



engravings diminish the luminous quality of paintings ; yet there are 

 people who hang paintings and engravings in the same room. Again, 

 there are others who would not do that, but who will hang paintings 

 together of which the style and sentiment are so absolutely incongruous 

 that they can not avoid conflict, and require entirely different moods 

 of mind for the right appreciation of them. Suppose you have a 

 gravely furnished room, a library, and one or two portraits in it of 

 thoughtful and serious men painted soberly and in quiet color, would 

 it not evidently be a great mistake to admit into that room any picture 

 whatever that should disturb the pensive tranquillity of the place ? 

 Fancy the effect if you admitted a gaudy modern portrait of an over- 

 dressed lady with a smirk upon her face as she sat happy in her glare 

 and flitter of millinery and trinkets ! There ought to be in every 

 room a certain prevailing note or mood of the human mind whatever 

 it may be, and everything should be kept subordinate to that one 

 dominant idea, with sufficient variety to avoid dullness, but without 

 transgression of the limits prescribed by the idea. In a word, let us 

 have ideal unity ; let us avoid the incongruous. A room may contain 

 different works of art, but, in a comprehensive sense, it is a work of 

 art in itself, and the first necessity for every work of art is unity. If 

 it is decided that the note of the room is to be cheerfulness, it is easy 

 to keep faithful to that. Light in itself is an element of cheerfulness, 

 so the wall-paper will be light. Water-colors are more cheerful than 

 oil-paintings, because water-color painting is apparently slighter and 

 more rapid ; it conveys better the idea of felicitous dexterity. "Water- 

 colors, too, may have margins, and the white of the margins gives much 

 light and gayety to a room. The frames must be gilded, because 

 nothing is so cheerful as gilding ; but they must not be heavy, because 

 massiveness is oppressive to the imagination. The pictures themselves 

 should be generally light, and the coloring as bright and gay as it can 

 be without crudity. In such a room we do not want melancholy land- 

 scapes or solemn-looking personages, but we want blue skies and sun- 

 shine, merrily rippling waters, human life in youth or healthy maturity, 

 happy in activity and love, not burdened with care and sorrow all in 

 that sweet dream-land of the poetic imagination 



"Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine." 



The opposite mood of thoughtful gravity is not by any means in- 

 ferior as a motive, and it is more in consonance with the habitual feel- 

 ings of mature age. The greatest of all artists have worked in the 

 serious sense, and our noblest pictures, like our sweetest songs, " are 

 those that tell of saddest thought," or, if not quite of the saddest, still 

 of that quietly grave, reflective thought which is " far from all resort 

 of mirth." Few paintings of the human face have such a permanent 

 hold upon the memory, or are so often looked at, or for so many min- 

 utes at once, as that picture by Francia in the Louvre which is simply 

 vol. xxix. 7 



