The studio in Mr. Albert Herter’s home, where shades for the Renaissance standards are cylinders of water-color paper decorated with a 
flat-wash design and edged with gold galloon 
How One Man Solved the Lighting Problem 
THE DIFFICULTY IN SOFTENING ELECTRIC LIGHTS TO BLEND WITH A CAREFULLY STUDIED 
ROOM—MAKING ONE’S OWN SHADES OUT OF DRAWING PAPER, STENCILED, CUT-OUT AND EDGED 
by Katharine Lord 
T HE soft and variable light of candles needed no modifica¬ 
tion, but with the coming of gas, oil lamps and electricity 
there arose the need o.f shielding the eye from the fixed unwav¬ 
ering flame and mellowing, diffusing or concentrating the light 
therefrom. These shades must be decorative and unimportant in 
the daytime, and decorative and important at night — truly a most 
difficult combination to effect 
and yet not impossible, as is 
shown by the accompanying pic¬ 
tures of the lighting of an ar¬ 
tist’s studio. 
In the arrangement of the 
lights in a room two things are 
to be considered, their actual 
usefulness, either for reading or 
for lighting pictures or other 
objects of special interest; and 
their value as decoration, both 
in daylight and at night. The 
contour of the room, and the 
disposition of the furniture will 
naturally determine the placing 
of the lights for usefulness, and 
yet even this must be carefully 
thought out in connection with 
the effect upon the eye. 
Who does not know the un¬ 
considered room with the typi¬ 
cal chandelier, where you must 
plant your chair in the middle 
of the floor in order to see to 
read? Who also so unfortunate 
as not to know the comfort of the room with reading light and 
comfortable chair in friendly relation? 
The eye seeks spots of shade in a lighted room, as it does in 
the landscape, and spaces of comparative darkness rest the eye 
in a room, as does a leafy shade out of doors. The unshaded 
desert is not more trying to the eyes and nerves than the room, 
large or small, in which every 
part is lighted with equal bril¬ 
liancy, though we do not always 
realize it, accustomed as we have 
grown to this barbarous custom 
of overlighting. Charming ef¬ 
fects may be obtained by so ar¬ 
ranging the lights as to bring 
into prominence some object or 
objects of pictorial value. In 
this art of pictorial lighting Mr. 
Albert Herter is a past master, 
and the illustrations of this ar¬ 
ticle are all of arrangements of 
lights in his studios. Mr. Her¬ 
ter holds that the lighting of a 
room should carry out as pur¬ 
poseful and carefully considered 
a scheme as the composition of 
a picture, and he would have all 
the lights of a given room main¬ 
tain a characteristic note of 
color and of form. 
In his study of the problem 
of decorative lighting Mr. Her¬ 
ter felt the need of a shade with 
The light may be thrown down for reading or it may be employed 
in two ways as here, where enough of the tinted paper shade is 
cut away to throw a soft light on the Japanese screen 
350 
