June, 1916 
31 
from head bookkeeper to be President of 
the Inter-Planetary, or some such illustrious 
concern, and at last erects the palace that 
has been his dream for thirty years. Just 
between friends, the pictures Mr. Jones has 
been purchasing are not Rembrandts and 
Turners. Still between friends the Joneses 
have scrimped. Hence the palace. Saving 
up for it, as they did, how could they make 
the Jones Collection a 
gallery of anything 
but “fright s” and 
“horrors?” Now that 
the palace is paid for, 
the Joneses feel poor. 
It will be an age be¬ 
fore they can afford 
pictures worthy of it. 
Besides, they belong 
to that happy class of 
people who say, 
proudly, “Of course, 
we don’t know any- 
anything about art, 
but we know what we 
like.” Let alone, they 
will hang their walls 
with esthetic incon¬ 
gruities. 
Nor is theirs so 
rare a case. Illus- 
t r a t o r s understand 
this—“bank on it,” in 
fact. That is why 
illustrations in our 
magazines so seldom 
illustrate. The artist 
has Jones in mind. 
After selling his 
sketch to a magazine 
he must sell it to a 
calendar m a n, and 
then to an advertiser, 
and finally, along will 
come Jones and buy 
the original in some 
emporium of art- 
treasures on the 
Board Walk at Atlan¬ 
tic City. It is an at¬ 
tractive enough sketch 
—for a calendar or an 
“ad.”—but, in Jones’s 
new palace, quite re¬ 
grettably “o n e on 
Jones.” 
True, there are 
talented Joneses — by 
name Frick, Morgan, 
etc.—who collect real 
masterpieces. But a 
part of our palace 
builders have neither 
the means nor the taste. It is better, at 
present, to discourage them outright, per¬ 
haps, though their palaces are built to stay 
and very possibly their grand-children will 
possess a genius for sound connoisseurship 
and be sorry that the walls forbid pictures. 
But, even supposing that Mr. Jones knows 
good pictures from bad and will purchase 
the best, an architect still shudders when 
he thinks of Mrs. Jones, for it is under her 
direction that faithful ’Awkins will hang 
them. Up they go, helter-skelter, at odd 
heights, all shapes and sizes, no two frames 
alike, a whimsy of cheerful disorder. The 
less harmoniously arranged they are, the 
more they delight Mrs. Jones. Walls the 
architect designed with infinite care for 
proportion suffer outrageous violence, wan¬ 
ton and limitless desecration, a change that 
makes him bang his head and cry in his 
misery, “Oh, what’s the use!” 
It is futile to reason with Mrs. Jones. 
You can’t say, “Now, my dear madam, you 
wouldn’t think of paying Paquin to cut 
your gown and then trim it yourself.” 
Neither can you say, “If you are so crazy 
about stringing up pictures, why not hang 
Although they do 
has painted 
require a large room to “carry them," the murals Arthur M. Hazard 
for his dining-room are eminently successful in their effect 
a few outside? Try it. See if that im¬ 
proves the design. Indoors or outdoors, 
it’s the same principle. The sole difference 
is custom.” No, the only sure way of curb¬ 
ing Mrs. Jones is to tell her that “pictures 
have gone out.” She will listen to that. She 
will even let you enforce the law by so de¬ 
signing her house that picture-hanging be¬ 
comes a vice as impossible as rabbit-fight¬ 
ing. 
Is the Framed Picture Ugly? 
Heroic treatment, doubtless, yet is it not 
an advance, esthetically ? Consider. The 
framed picture has its unlovely traits, once 
you see with unprejudiced eyes. The wire 
is not beautiful. The crinkly reflections on 
glass are not beautiful. The mat, if it has 
one, is not beautiful. The outward tilt is 
not beautiful. And, although that charm¬ 
ing artist, Mr. Hermann Dudley Murphy, 
has done much to reform picture-framing 
in America, the usual frame is no triumph 
of artistic perfection. A little blatant, a 
little “hard” and “dry,” it is “unsympa¬ 
thetic.” A dozen such frames strew a wall 
with uncompromising rectangles without 
dignity or fusing 
grace. They don’t 
“compose.” 
The Worm Turns 
Architects have 
long endured tor¬ 
ments at their clients’ 
hands. They have 
seen a magnificent 
commercial building 
desecrated with mon¬ 
strous and hideous 
wireless plants or with 
frightful gold-letter¬ 
ing or with those 
heart-breaking electric 
signs. They have 
seen stately mansions 
made comic with friv¬ 
olous paint. They 
have seen “additions” 
ruin a house once ex¬ 
quisite. There was 
no help for all that. 
But here there is, and 
the worm has turned. 
Down with pictures! 
An enraged worm, 
however, may at 
times go to rather un¬ 
fortunate extremes, 
and when panelled 
wood or panelled 
plaster rule out pic¬ 
tures, the test of the 
result is its looks. To 
me, at least, it looks 
very handsome, very 
distinguished, but aw¬ 
fully, awfully lone- 
s o m e. Vaguely, it 
suggests the rich 
lobby of a skyscraper, 
or the grand saloon 
of a liner. It is “pure 
design”—elegant, re¬ 
fined, impersonal, un- 
expressive. One sad¬ 
ly misses the pic¬ 
tures and wishes them 
back. 
Meanwhile, one 
notes a curious in¬ 
consistency. The drastic measure that 
banishes pictures still allows a stag’s head on 
the wall. It allows rugs of Mrs. Jones’s 
choosing on the floor and in such places as 
Mrs. Jones commands. Nor has it interfered 
with Mrs. Jones’s furniture. To be thor¬ 
oughgoing and insist on architecture pure 
and undefiled, why not mosaic floors and 
built-in furniture like the pulpit, lectern and 
choir-stalls of a chapel? The panelled, 
pictureless walls seem to hint at just that. 
Or is it my prejudice? 
You can never be quite sure how far the 
resentment against a new idea springs from 
mere habit. You can, however, be sure of 
a lifelong affection. All my life I have 
loved pictures. They have souls. Wood 
(Continued on page 70) 
