January, 1918 
29 
PERSIAN MOTIFS in FURNITURE 
A Recent Achievement in Decorative Art whereby We Have Brought 
to America a Touch of the Symbolism of the Ancient East 
G. W. HARTING 
r 
■ 
! 
I 
i 
W E of the Twentieth Century are the 
greatest art-borrowers of history. For 
not only do we conscript and adapt from 
primitive peoples, and from ancient civiliza¬ 
tions that have brought their art to a high 
degree of complexity; we even take advantage 
of the Ali Baba wealth of previous free¬ 
booters whose art was eclectic in the days 
when Europe was a barbaric fringe around 
the 2£gean, waiting for Alexander to be born. 
In other words, we have just achieved Per¬ 
sian furniture—or rather we have taken some 
of the charming designs of Persian art and 
made use of them as decorative panels for 
quite American furniture in our quite cosmo¬ 
politan homes. 
The Persians never had an art of their own, 
just as we have no art of our own. But, as 
they would have told us themselves, they 
didn’t need it. From the days when Cyrus 
and his bands swarmed out of the north and 
shook effete Babylon from its Hanging Gar¬ 
dens to its two-leaved gates, for two 
hundred and fifty luxurious years, 
the Medo-Persian Empire ruled much 
as the Romans ruled when history 
had moved westward. A military 
A close view of the 
door panel shown op¬ 
posite. Designs of this 
sort are especially 
suited to placing against 
plain, flat surfaces 
caste, they had only to command, and lo! all 
the artists and artisans of all the conquered 
races trickled in over mountains and across 
deserts to make Persepolis and Susa (the 
Shushan of Queen Esther) the pillared, 
painted wonders of the ancient world. 
Those endless rows of processional figures 
inherited from Assyria—winged bulls, swart 
warriors bearing spears and bows—changed 
gradually into slaves bearing vases for per¬ 
fumes, slaves carrying musical instruments, 
slaves with cakes and wines. 
Cambyses, restless in his purple palace, 
reached out and conquered Egypt. The mar¬ 
vels of Sais, Memphis, Thebes—the vast col¬ 
umned halls of the old Pharaohs, stirred him 
to go home to Persia carrying Egyptian archi¬ 
tects who would build greater halls and lof¬ 
tier pillars. To vary the external face of his 
huge walls, “he built them of different quali¬ 
ties of brick, and in the most carefully wrought 
parts of his palace he applied enamel, ivory, 
metal, costly woods tinted exotically.” 
His ceilings were painted; his floors 
were like those vast pavements of 
Esther’s description, “alabaster and 
(Continued on page 66) 
An overmantel 
panel in imitation 
tile shows soft 
toned figures and 
design against a 
background of black 
ground and sky 
The desk below, 
whose upper panel 
is shown in detail 
on the opposite 
page, is finished in 
lacquer of a deep 
purple color 
Persian designs are 
by no means al¬ 
ways ornate. The 
two conventional¬ 
ized trees below 
represent one of 
the simpler motifs 
Above, an imitation 
of a one-piece tile, 
suitable for over¬ 
mantel hanging. Its 
colors adapt it to 
use with many dif¬ 
ferent backgrounds 
