October, 
1917 
27 
THE CIVILIZED FRAMING of PICTURES 
. A Sprightly Dissertation on the Lovely Frame that Becomes the Lovely Picture 
— What Sister Susie Does About It and What a Certain Bostonian Advises 
T HESE are the notes — the gasping but 
nevertheless coherent notes—of a red- 
letter noonday in Boston. Troops were leaving 
for France. Military necessity barred half the 
downtown streets. Traffic went mad in the 
rest. Through the worst of it, there sat I in a 
touring car owned and driven by a certain 
Bostonian, who, besides being a brilliant 
painter and the best frame-maker in America, 
can dispense the pure gospel of frames with 
one side of his brain while dodging sudden 
death with the other. 
Pumping a celebrity under circumstances 
like those may appear a somewhat wanton ad¬ 
venture, considering that almost anybody’s 
Sister Sue has understood framing from her 
pigtailhood up. If one wants a frame, one 
takes along Sue. A glib salesman exhibits 
several dozen quite captivating sticks, some 
gilded, some varnished, some treated with a 
dull wax finish that denotes “a nice piece o’ 
goods lady; shows up fine,” to say nothing of 
combinations. After a few moments’ discus¬ 
sion, Sue chooses a stick and a “thread” to em¬ 
bellish it, so, with “Day after tomorrow” on 
the salesman’s lips and “Two weeks from Sat¬ 
urday” in his heart, the bargain is struck. 
But, although Sue is doubtless a dear, good 
soul and fit for a hundred things, trust her not 
with frames. She decides too impulsively, 
whereas she will expend half a winter’s devout 
reflection upon the choice of a new gown or of 
a setting for a jewel. She means that the set¬ 
ting shall enhance the jewel and the gown en¬ 
hance Sue. When it comes to frames, she 
thinks, “What is a frame anyhow, but a kind 
of fancy margin? Pick the handsomest, and 
there you are.” Great head! Mrs. “Hi” Saw¬ 
yer goes on that principle and frames “Hi” in 
seashells glued on. 
N OW, I shall not be too hard on Sue. 
Framing looks easy. It looks a lot easier 
than selecting a gown. But the truth is, it 
takes infinite imagination and judgment and 
taste, and the frames one oftenest sees tend to 
ruin one’s abilities. Frames last. New and 
better styles only slowly supplant the old and 
worse. These, persisting as they do, give sup¬ 
port to bad taste. The deep, over-patterned, 
brightly gilded, “composition” frames in which 
the works of Corot, Daubigny, Millet, and 
Rousseau first visited America, still seem to 
most Americans the “correct wear” for oil- 
paintings. Sue agrees. Then, too, she has felt 
the influence of picture-shows. When Mr. 
Garrett Hungerford (well named) sends “But 
Yet a Tree” to an exhibition, he exhausts his 
credit in giving it a frame excessively loud and 
wide. Talking it over with a fellow artist, he 
will say, “You can’t put a toot horn on a 
picture, you know, or an electric sign, and a 
man must get noticed somehow. Besides, it 
pays to take up room. I’ve elbowed my 
neighbors clean out of my way.” Well, so he 
has, and properly enough. At an art-show, 
anything to prevent jamming pictures too close 
together. But alas for Sister Sue! It is there 
she learns to tolerate outrageous width and 
vociferosity. 
Meanwhile, she has unconsciously studied 
under the photographer. People do comical 
ROLLIN LYNDE HARTT 
enough things to photographs, on their own 
account; you have seen apartment-house rooms 
overrun with portraits framed in solid silver, 
glistening like table-plate, so that each rela¬ 
tive’s effigy suggested the head of John the 
Baptist in a charger; yet it has remained for 
the photographer to mount dark photographs 
on staring white mats, and then, as if this were 
not crime sufficient, superemphasize the harsh 
edges with lines indented on the mat. 
A mat, so my authority insists, should never 
be lighter or darker than the average tone of 
the picture. Especially, it should never ac¬ 
centuate the edges, nor should the frame. In 
composing a picture, an artist puts the highest 
contrast, whether of color or of light and shade, 
at the point of highest interest—that is to say, 
somewhere near the center. Contrast at the 
edges pulls a composition apart. 
G AUDY frames can play still worse mis¬ 
chief than that. We hopped out of the 
car and stepped into an auction room to con¬ 
sider a case in point—a wide, deep, heavy, 
multi-patterned frame of flashing gold, while 
the painting inside was one of those pitch-dark 
glooms against which Turner revolted with an 
entirely pardonable venom. Amid that blaze, 
impossible to see the picture! 
What then—choose something meek and 
lowly in “framings” and let it go at that? 
Yes, and no. Planning her new gown, Sister 
Sue is not dreaming of a creation in Christmas- 
tree tinsel. Yet Miss Diamond Dizzidale, who 
jumps through hoops in “twice-a-day” and 
comes on with peroxide tresses, gorgeous 
cheeks, and eyes richly charcoaled, wears tinsel 
effectively. The point, both as regards dress 
and as regards framing, is to aim at suitability. 
Sometimes only a mousy-quiet frame will 
harmonize with the picture. A Whistler 
“Symphony in Blue and Silver,” where a dim 
moon mirrors itself in placid Venetian water, 
invites the same serene effect in the frame. A 
spirited Delacroix, on the other hand, or a 
Sargent with bold, vivid brushwork, can 
“wear” a frame somewhat more emphatic. Just 
here is where Mr. Murphy’s liking for Italian 
hand-carved frames finds its practicality. 
While the hand-carving has charms of its 
own, since the varied surfaces court a varied 
play of soft light, its technique lends a wonder¬ 
ful adaptability to the raised design. By mak¬ 
ing the edges of a pattern sharper or less 
pronounced, the craftsman modulates sonority 
almost as a painter does. The same paint can 
shout or coo, according as the brush lays it on 
daringly or with restraint, and the same design 
can sing or murmur, according as the tools, in 
treating its edges, give them accent or repres¬ 
sion. It is even possible to attain something 
very like the mellowness of ancient frames that 
have been regilded over and over again until 
the pattern has mostly disappeared. 
I AM not denying that the special Providence 
which takes care of intoxicated men, little 
children, and the United States of America 
might enable Sister Sue to hit on the perfect 
frame by fingering stick after stick at the 
frame-shop. I am only hinting that Provi¬ 
dence has other interests in life. Also that 
Sister Sue is a handful. Blandly ignorant, she 
lias never given a thought to the principles of 
design and knows rather less about gilding. 
Nor does it help matters much if the salesman 
draws her attention to his “snappy line of real 
hand-carved Italian frames all made up and 
great bargains.” Look out! A good frame 
costs anywhere from fifty to five hundred dol¬ 
lars. There’s a reason. 
Gold comes high. Water gold—namely, the 
genuine thing—is as pure as the gold in your 
ring. Oil gold—“at a ruinous reduction”—is 
mere bronze, and “Roman gold” heaven knows 
what. Besides, there remains the question of 
color. Gold affords every conceivable tone. 
You are not to suppose, however, that my 
Bostonian friend frowns upon all save Italian 
hand-carved frames, with designs modulated 
to suit the picture’s “values” and a finish of 
water gold in the color that suits. Sometimes 
he makes black frames, or silvered frames, or 
white frames, or frames in brown paper or silk. 
Except for avoiding gilt wood with the grain 
showing through, he is as broadly eclectic as 
his three names. When he jeers at bad fram¬ 
ing, his disgust betrays no narrowness, but 
instead a contempt for the over-pronounced, the 
inappropriate and shoddy—this last meaning 
the sort of workmanship, for example, that 
employs cheap gilt, poor wood, and vile cabi¬ 
net-making. 
Several years ago, artists took to calling 
themselves “painter men” by way of dropping 
the Bohemian pose, and I suspect that when 
this super-frame maker went in for picture¬ 
framing, he thought of himself as primarily an 
inspired carpenter. Bravo! In consequence, 
his frames never crack at the corners, whereas 
bad ones do after only a brief exposure to our 
indoor American climate. However, he carried 
with him all his fine artistic enthusiasm—in¬ 
deed, began by making frames for his own 
pictures. A picture, so he reasoned, does not 
stop where the frame begins, but continues to 
the outer edge of the frame, which is as im¬ 
portant, artistically, as that much space on the 
canvas itself. More so, if anything. Certainly 
it demands reflective, conscientious, sympa¬ 
thetic handling, and calls for “all that a man 
hath of fortitude and delicacy.” 
I HATE to say it, but Sister Sue lacks forti¬ 
tude. She is not plucky enough to face a 
big, tough problem with her maximum re¬ 
sourcefulness. She putters. And in her 
puttering she lacks delicacy. To be sure, she 
knows that oil-paintings will “carry” broader, 
deeper frames than water-colors, and that 
(Continued on page 72) 
