House and Garden 
too fragile, too ornate for outdoor use. 
Besides being employed as finials on gate 
posts, as wall ornaments and as accents of a 
design, special uses for jars of simple texture 
are often discoverable. In a garden near 
Bernardsville, N. J., that of Mrs. Archibald 
Alexander,the landscape architect, Mr. Daniel 
W. Langton, has partially imbedded one of 
them on a hillside, to receive through a 
buried pipe, introduced at its base, the water 
from a near-by fountain. The pot is so 
placed that the overflow runs down its body, 
forming a film that 
flashes back the sun¬ 
light. This is but 
oneofthe numerous 
occasional functions 
that the hardy oil or 
wine jar of contem¬ 
porary craftsman¬ 
ship may fill. 
These Italian jars, 
then, have been the 
main dependence of 
the designers of 
formal gardens,aside 
from the stone orna¬ 
ments discussed in a 
previous paper of 
this series. But 
they by no means 
exhaust Italy’s re¬ 
sources in pottery 
for outdoor service. 
Old pieces of terra 
cotta are constantly 
being brought to 
this country, such 
as the long-handled From the Tiffany Studios 
specimen from 
Rome, secured for the H. D. Gardiner gal¬ 
leries. The attenuated shape is stronger 
than it looks, despite the apparently perilous 
construction. The spreading of the roots 
of the handles into long fingers that clasp 
the body of the vase is worth noting. 
Of a consistency like cement, and a gray 
color that recalls the same substance are 
three large and very old oil jars found in 
Southern Italy, now the property of Mr. 
Stanford White. They are ornamented with 
encircling bands, and seem to have been 
partly imbedded in the earth. The full 
swelling shapes, with the narrow bases, sug¬ 
gest that they were intended to be buried up 
to the lowest band, which in each example 
is widened out to form carrying lugs. 
The decoration is purely geometrical. In 
two of the jars the unit of design for the 
ornamented bands is a diagonal, like the 
main vein of a chestnut leaf, from whose 
upper side run vertical lines to the edge 
of the band, while from the lower side of 
the diagonal start horizontal lines to meet 
the verticals of the adjoining space. While 
the f r e e d o m and 
irregularity of the 
outline and texture 
of the jars are 
noticeable, this bit 
of decoration is 
quite inflexible and 
in several cases the 
units overlap. It is 
as though the design 
had been roughly 
impressed in the 
softclavwith a raised 
mould, instead of 
being cut out, every 
line separately, by a 
hand tool. This de¬ 
tracts from the elas¬ 
ticity of the whole 
only when closely 
examined, as its scale 
is comparatively 
small. The case is 
worth citing—per¬ 
haps the designer 
expected his work to 
be judged only by 
its general aspect, 
and thought it a waste of time to draw out 
these little channels by the laborious one-at- 
a-time process. Perhaps he deemed it as un¬ 
necessary as would the late Anton Mauve to 
have filled the broadly painted faces of his 
Dutch shepherds with microscopic detail—at 
the proper distance, one gets quite enough 
to define fully the painter’s impression. 
Another species of Italian garden orna¬ 
ment, found in this country, is the terra 
cotta cast taken from a stone original. Ven¬ 
etian lions and other figures, besides the 
ordinary jars, bowls, and basins, are thus 
A TERRA COTTA REPRODUCTION OF 
VENETIAN LIONS 
