30 
HOUSE & GARDEN 
.t.ii.tu. 
“ It sounds a bit grandiose at first, the suggestion of mural paintings for the private house. One associates them with public libraries, 
hotel lobbies, churches and the glorified railway station,” yet a glimpse of this room in the residence of Robert L. Steevens, Esq., 
at Bernardsville, New Jersey, shows the plan to be feasible enough 
HOUSES WITHOUT PICTURES 
Possible Reasons for the Unpictured Panel Wall — The Use of Murals 
for the Private Residence — The Architect as Picture Hanger 
ROLLIN LYNDE HARTT 
S HE was a lady — “a regular limousine 
lady,” as a friend of mine would say— 
and she had an authoritative air of speak¬ 
ing for the “right people” when she lifted 
her silver-mounted lorgnette, and remarked, 
in a dutiful tone, “Pictures have gone out. 
I wouldn’t have one in my house.” 
Fortunately, I had met this doctrine be¬ 
fore. Mr. E. V. Lucas, in a recent book of 
his, makes an architect warn his client 
against pictures as a “foreign substance” 
injected into the design to its degradation 
and utter ruin. So it was English, the on¬ 
slaught on pictures. Because English, it 
was aristocratic. It went with the lorgnette. 
However, I felt a distinct shock, which re¬ 
newed itself next day when I got out a port¬ 
folio of American photographs and found 
dozens and scores of pictureless interiors 
all in fine houses erected within the last year 
or two. 
The uprising against pictures is not only 
extensive; it is growing. Architects at 
once numerous and distinguished are treat¬ 
ing walls in panelled wood and panelled 
plaster so that picture-hanging becomes a 
physical impossibility. Away with the ex¬ 
quisite Corots, the dreamy Whistlers, the 
Sargents, Pactons, the Dabos. The “right 
people”—with lorgnettes—consent to keep 
The nature of the painting can be purely decora¬ 
tive as in this panel by Ralph Helm Johonnot 
architecture unpolluted by “foreign sub¬ 
stances.” 
Now, it is easy to poke fun at the “right 
people,” especially when they assume a duti¬ 
ful tone and an air of authority and look 
at you through silver-mounted lorgnettes, 
and yet it is a question whether in this case 
they are not as right as they are “right.” 
Others, without lorgnettes, have followed 
their example, deliberately and on principle 
and out of respect for highly honorable tra¬ 
ditions. The Greeks never hung pictures 
on walls, nor did the lords of Roman villas 
at Pompeii. Mediaeval abbeys, monasteries 
and castles had their frescoes, perhaps, and 
perhaps their sumptuous Gobelin tapestries, 
but were guiltless of framed pictures. The 
custom now pretty nearly universal is hard¬ 
ly more than four or five centuries old—a 
novelty, as these things go, and still on trial. 
The Case of Jones 
It is easy, moreover, to poke fun at the 
architects. They certainly invite it when 
they talk as if their creations were so mas¬ 
terly that the presence of a Rembrandt or 
a Turner would be a sacrilege. But let us 
see if in reality it is so sure to be an affair 
of Rembrandts and Turners. Mr. Roderick 
Titherington Jones, for example, has risen 
