HOUSE AND GARDEN 
24 
door, all his leaded-glass casement windows, a unique window 
niche for the living-room, and his two beautiful fan-topped doors 
that form part of the wainscot on either side of the door in the 
same way, and usually for $4 or $5 apiece. From the wrecks 
of a balustrade Mr. Foster gathered together as many of the 
spindle-shaped balusters as he could carry under his arm and 
bought them for fifty cents. They are now part of the balusters 
that guard the gallery. There were not enough to go round, so 
they have been combined with square ones, three square ones 
to one spindle, then again one square baluster to one spindle, 
and so on. 
In the living-room is a large, soft-green velvet sofa, eight and 
a half feet long, three and a half through, with a back and 
sides nine inches deep, one of the sofas that you have only to 
sink into to know the personification of luxuriousness. This sofa 
is the dominant piece of furniture in the room. That is one of 
the secrets of. furnishing at times, this use of accents or, shall 
we say here, this use of an effective fortissimo. The sofa is 
an expensive piece of furniture, but it was well worth its price. 
The Fosters had bought it as good as new at a Fifth avenue 
auction place for $23 ! Of course, it was its size, the very quality 
that it gave to this high living-room, that made it seem so low 
at auction. You would not naturally look to Fifth avenue auction 
places for inexpensive finds, but the wing chair that you see in 
the photograph of the studio and that Mr. Foster uses repeatedly 
August, 1915 
in his illustrations cost only $21. Mr. Foster has, of course, 
chairs like his French ones that cost in the hundreds, but the 
delightful slat-back in the photograph of the living-room fireplace, 
with its charmingly-curved slats and its reed bottoms, cost $4 
and the Windsor cost $7. An illustrator like Mr. Foster needs 
a great many chairs, but only one of a kind. The living-room 
is a room exactly suited to chair assembling of this sort, in fact 
some of its charm lies in the way its furnishings can be assem¬ 
bled and reassembled. 
In some rooms the furnishings all have their one and only 
appropriate place — not that such rooms have not virtues of their 
own — but in a high room with as many fixed features as this has— 
a great fireplace, a gallery, book shelves, cabinet closets, high 
wainscot, great sofa, not to mention the heavy-beamed and 
girdered ceiling — the movable furnishings are not needed to play 
an architectural part in the composition of the room as a whole. 
They can take a lighter — an action part. 
It is here that some of the qualities that have made the still 
life of Mr. Foster’s illustrations such a success comes into play. 
He likes big, quiet spaces in a room, but against them plenty 
of action, go, slap-and-dash and "ping.” “Ping” is a favorite 
word of Will Foster's. 
We asked him to build up some still life groups for 11s. 
It was interesting to watch him. Take the lower shelf of the 
( Continued on page 46) 
The living-room is one and a half stories high with a gallery running along the side. Arranged with a nonchalance that makes them perfectly at home, are the couch, 
shutter-wainscot, old doors and tables that the cwner rescued from oblivion 
