42 
House & Garden 
USING SCULPTURE IN THE HOME 
Simple Rules for Selecting and Placing It So That Both The 
Sculpture and the Room Are Enrichea 
PEYTON BOSWELL 
W HEN designed for the out of doors, 
sculpture appears in all its freedom 
—heroic, limitless, with the blue sky above 
it. When designed for the interior of build¬ 
ings, it becomes more intimate and confi¬ 
dential and charming. In the open it either 
declaims or, in lower key, recites a lyric. 
Inside, it converses with you, and if there 
is mutuality of feeling, it becomes com¬ 
panionable and a part of your life. 
That is the human way of approaching 
the problem of sculpture for the inside of 
the home. If that were all there were to it, 
selecting it and using it would be very sim¬ 
ple indeed; one could go about it much as 
one selects one’s friends—as a matter of 
companionship, of likes and dislikes. How¬ 
ever, this way of looking at it provides the 
urge, rather than the deed. There is a 
mechanical side, as well as a human side, 
and the two cannot be divorced. 
Do you remember when you were a young¬ 
ster and went to school, how hard it was to 
do a problem in square root? Multiplica¬ 
tion and fractions and such things seemed 
like play in comparison with it. 
But, a little later on, when you had to 
do cube root, do you remember what a brain- 
racking, fathomless, almost hopeless task it 
A Chinese porcelain image can be used on an 
unpainted Louis Quinze mantel 
was not only to master the method of do¬ 
ing, but actually to do it after you thought 
you had the method? 
Square root was a two-dimensional prob¬ 
lem ; it had to do with length and breadth— 
you slid around on a plain surface. Cube 
root was a three-dimensional affair; it had 
to do with length, breadth and depth, and 
you got lost inside of it—in fact, it seemed 
fathomless. 
The decoration of a room with pictures 
may be compared with square root; you 
have a plane surface put up against a plane 
surface, which you must manipulate with 
due regard to color scheme, atmosphere, 
period, etc. 
But when you come to statuary, it be¬ 
comes a problem in space as well as surface, 
in addition to the various other artistic re¬ 
quirements. And it is space that cannot be 
measured by root. A very small piece of 
sculpture may be too large for a commodi¬ 
ous corner of a room, while a larger piece 
may be too small. Only good taste and 
artistic judgment can make things come out 
right. 
There are two ways of providing a room 
with statuary—the period method, which is 
more or less restricted, and the so-called 
The atmosphere oj this room being Italian it is fitting that the Italian stone Renaissance mantel shotdd be enriched with 16 th Century Italian 
carved wood, polychrome and parcel gilt saint and angels. Courtesy of Mrs. James W. Ayer 
