KELMSGOTT HOUSE 



knew well enough," says Mr. Glutton-Brock, ' that Michael 

 Angelo and Velasquez were great men, but he judged the art of 

 an age rather by its cottages, and cups and saucers, than by its 

 great pictures." 



Morris, it is true, may never have exactly stated this, in words, 

 but the elaborate character of his designs for wall-paper and 

 hangings, which really renders paintings unnecessary, are, it seems 

 to me, practical and ocular proof that this was his belief. He 

 appears never to have regarded a wall as the natural setting for 

 pictures, which is the way in which painters regard it, and he 

 valued pictures only so far as they helped the decorative scheme. 

 They might, of course, conceivably, serve an ornamental end, 

 and conduce to a desirable tout ensemble, but not more successfully 

 than any well-designed wall-paper. Pictures indeed, so Mr. 

 Mackail allows, gave to Morris the uneasy feeling that their decora- 

 tive value was out of proportion to the labour expended upon 

 them ; and he would have preferred that the faces in Burne-Jones' 

 paintings should have been less highly finished, less charged with 

 concentrated meaning and emotion ; and this notwithstanding 

 that Burne-Jones was not a dramatic painter. Much as he appre- 

 ciated Fra Angelico, Van Eyck, and Holbein, " his three greatest 

 admirations among the painters of past ages," he would willingly 

 at any time have exchanged the National Gallery and everything 

 in it, for the illuminated books in the British Museum, illuminating 

 being one of the arts in which, quite early in life, he had become 

 proficient. 



Thus, in Morris's scheme for the " House Beautiful," he left 

 no room for pictures, large, or of cabinet size ; nor for fine original, 

 or excellent reproductions of great masters, nor for etchings or 

 engravings. The easel picture was ignored, or rather I should say 

 forgotten. He would have had people hang their walls with 

 tapestries ; for those who would not or could not do this, he de- 

 signed wall-paper of wonderful beauty and originality, but his 

 earlier patterns for these for example, " The Daisy " and the 

 " Pomegranate " delicate and simple though they are, are very 

 " spotty " when regarded as background. His more ambitious 

 and intricate later designs are open to what, from my point of 

 view as a painter of pictures, is the very serious objection that 

 they are complete in themselves, and so attractive and interesting, 



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