KELMSCOTT HOUSE 
knew well enough,” says Mr. Clutton-Brock, ‘“‘ tnat 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 @ painter of pictures, is the very serious objection that 
they are complete in themselves, and so attractive and interesting, 
289 Ig 
