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HOME AND FLOWERS 



She has already appointed a permanent 

 Commission on Public Art and Architecture, 

 and, in the system of education which the 

 institution is carrying on, the betterment 

 idea has become very prominent. The Gliaii- 

 taiiquau magazine, the organ of the move- 

 ment, is publishing a series of articles on 

 civic betterment, and conducting a Round 

 Table for discussion of these topics. 



"Cultivated mind is the guardian genius 

 of democracy. . . . It is the only dicta- 

 tor that freemen acknowledge and the only 

 security that freemen desire." — Mirabeau B. 

 Lamar. 



Is Landscape Gardening One of the Fine Arts ? ] 



An interesting discussion as to whether 

 landscape gardening is one of the fine arts 

 or only a "by-product" was presented at the 

 recent convention of the American Park and 

 Outdoor Art Association, by Mr. Bryan 

 Lathrop, of Chicago. There is an unfor- 

 tunate tendency, Mr. Lathrop contended, "to 

 introduce into landscape gardening a formal- 

 Ism based on architectural lines and prin- 

 ciples which, if not checked, will very soon 

 debase and degrade it." He holds that 

 landscape gardening is not only one of the 

 fine arts, but that it is one of the greatest 

 of them, and that it has possibilities of de- 

 velopment of which the others are absolutely 

 incapable. He points out the fact that land- 

 scape gardening is the only one of the arts 

 of design which, in the nineteenth century, 

 "made any progress beyond the achieve- 

 ments of the great artistic periods of his- 

 tory." Sculpture "is now only the pale 

 shadow of the age of Pericles." Painting 

 "has produced nothing within a hundred 

 years which ranks with the work of the 

 Italian Renaissance." Architecture, as a 

 creative art, "has ceased to exist . . . 

 the best architects of our- age are the most 

 successful copyists." Landscape painting, 

 however, he says, "has made great strides 

 in advance of Salvator Rosa, the best of the 

 Italians, and of the Poussins and Claude 

 Lorrain, the best of the old French schools." 



The explanation of this, Mr. Lathrop de- 

 clares, is found in the fact that a love of na- 

 ture for her own sake is distinctly modern. 

 The only one of the old gardens to be quite 

 natural, he says further, was the English 

 garden — "God bless it." Mr. Lathrop depre- 

 cates "the tendency of today toward the 

 stiff and unlovely formalism in landscape 

 design." He hopes that this country will 

 produce a Michael Angelo in landscape gar- 

 dening. He enthuses in these words: 



"In this young country, with its exuberant 

 energy, its mcreasing wealth and the devel- 

 opment of good taste and a love of the beau- 

 tiful, the opportunities which the future of 

 landscape gardening has in store for a great 

 artistic genius seem almost boundless. With 

 vast wealth at his command, and, for ma- 

 terials, the earth, the sky, mountains, lakes, 

 rivers, waterfalls, forests, and the flora of 

 the whole earth, and with vistas bounded 

 only by the limits of human sight, he can 

 create pictures which will be to natural 

 scenery what the Hermes at Olympia is to 

 the natural man, not copies, but the assem- 

 blage of the perfections of nature, beside 

 which the greatest works of other arts will 

 seem as small as the oil paintings, despised 

 by Michael Angelo, beside the dome of St. 

 Peter's." 



Mr. Lathrop's contention that the love of 

 nature for her own sake is distinctly modern 

 finds echo in a number of current magazine 

 articles. The editor of Current Literature 

 grows enthusiastic. He says: 



"The discovery of a continent by a pious 

 Italian, bent on a new crusade, was a marvel 

 to his age and to ours a godsend; but of 

 greater significance to the human soul is 

 this fresh discovery of a realm all about us, 

 unexplored by our fathers, undreamed of by 

 our grandfathers, but in which our children 

 and children's children shall increasingly 

 live — the realm of nature and of nature's 

 law." 



Sorrow often comes to us through the 

 gateway of selfishness; and departs from us 

 through the gateway of sacrifice. 



As to Reading Pictures 



When we can read pictures as we read 

 books, as understandingly and with an equal 

 capacity for enjoyment, then we will know 

 why certain pictures are well done and why 

 the world has called their creators great 

 masters. Miss Mabel Emery, whose article 

 entitled "Looking at Pictures" appears in 

 this number of Home and Flowers, has 

 written a successful book on the subject 

 "How to Enjoy Pictures." (The Prang Ed- 

 ucational Company, Boston.) This title is 

 at first apt to excite the suspicion that the 

 book is of the didactic order — the kind which 

 tells people what they ought to be or do. 

 It must be confessed that the average reader 

 is very weary of analytical criticism, which 

 so often imputes mystical and psychological 

 motives to every artist whose work is over 

 the heads of the multitude. But Miss 

 Emery's "How to Enjoy Pictures" is not 

 a book of criticism. She frankly states in 

 the beginning that she leaves theories of 

 fine art and its historic development to the 

 critics and historians of art; and she gen- 

 erously appends a reference list of the best 

 books on art for the student and club 



