82 
House & Garden 
“MME. LARMOYER PLAYING THE LYRE ” by TESTIER 
HIGH CLASS OLD PAINTINGS 
TAPESTRIES, WORKS OF ART 
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY FURNITURE 
647 Fifth Avenue New York City 
Paris — 57 Rue La Boetie 
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Tobey 
Hand-Made 
Furniture 
Quality in workmanship and mater¬ 
ials gives to a Tobey hancFmade piece 
the element of permanence which re¬ 
presents true economy. 
Built to last for ages, Tobey hand¬ 
made furniture has also imperishable 
merit of design. 
The Fobey Furniture Company 
Chicago: Wabash Avenue arid Washington Street 
New York: Fifth Avenue a7id Fifty-third Street 
How To Buy Pictures 
(Continued from page 32) 
and mass and accents of detail, such 
as is needed for costume - creations, 
that you will bring to play in selecting 
your over-mantel picture. The room 
itself presents a composition, involving 
lines, vertical, horizontal and perhaps 
curved; wall masses also, which may be 
broken up into panels; a general ten¬ 
dency to simplicity or elaboration of de¬ 
sign, to severity or luxuriousness, to 
largeness or smallness of effect. You 
must have clarified your mind as to the 
character and quality of composition 
that your room presents before you can 
intelligently consider the composition of 
the picture that is to enhance its effects 
by some kind of contrast. 
Again I could patter of little safety 
devices, such as the desirability of off¬ 
setting the room’s excessive liorizontality 
of effect by a picture whose composition 
involves a predominance of vertical lines. 
Too Much Decoration 
By this time you will be on the road 
to that other motive for buying a picture 
—namely, interest in the picture for its 
own sake. This, of course, is the higher 
and really conclusive reason for buying 
a picture; and there is much justifica¬ 
tion for the artist’s complaint that the 
modern interior decorator, if allowed 
free play, is apt to lefive very little 
space for pictures, while their selection 
is hampered by the fear of disturbing 
the symmetry of the room. Such regu¬ 
lated symmetry is more suitable to the 
impersonal character of a hotel parlor, 
a concert hall or other place of public 
assemblage. It is opposed to the feel¬ 
ing of a home in which, if anywhere, 
the personal touch should be prized. 
You may have bought and paid for 
such a room, but cannot fully be said 
to own it. If it cramps the exercise of 
your own judgment and taste, it rather 
owns you. 
And how does this interest in pictures 
for their own sake originate? In many 
ways, no doubt; but frequently, I be¬ 
lieve from one of two reasons. Either 
you have observed what pleasure some 
one else derives from pictures and wish 
to see if your own interest in life can 
be similarly enhanced; or suddenly a 
picture strikes a chord in your memory 
or experience and you are astonished 
and delighted to find that it makes a 
definite, personal appeal to you. 
To begin with the former case. The 
example of somebody else has prompted 
you to buy a picture; but as yet a pic¬ 
ture means nothing more to you than the 
representation of certain objects or some 
scene. Out of the immense variety of 
pictures, old and new, how shall you 
begin to make a selection? Perhaps 
you feel the need of an adviser. If so, 
you will have no difficulty in finding 
some one who will tell you what you 
ought to buy and proceed to spend 
your money for you. 
But the best, the only real adviser, 
will be the one who tries to help you 
to discover some preference of your 
own, and to choose the picture for your¬ 
self. If possible, he or she will ac¬ 
company you to some museum or to the 
dealers’ galleries and talk not so much 
to you as with you about the various 
styles and motives of pictures. The 
aim will be to stimulate your own men¬ 
tal activity, your curiosity, observation 
and interest; to help you to discover 
why one picture may seem to mean more 
to you than others do. The reason will 
be due to something in the picture and 
to something in yourself. When you 
have discovered the latter, you will be in 
a position to judge how far the appeal 
of the picture is worth while to you 
and whether it is likely to be durable 
and accumulative. 
At this point you may feel disposed 
to ask your adviser whether the picture 
is a good one of its kind; or of two 
pictures, between which your interest 
balances, which is the better. This is 
to have recourse to his or her knowledge 
of technical qualities and you should 
insist that the advice involves some ex¬ 
planation of technicalities, intelligible to 
yourself. Then, if you buy the picture, 
it will be one that means something to 
you not only because of its subject, but 
also because of the way it is painted. 
But, perhaps, the most genuine start 
in buying pictures is when you sudden¬ 
ly become aware that a picture has made 
a friend of you so completely, that you 
want to have the friendship with you in 
your home. There was the case of a 
well-known American manufacturer who 
every day on the way to his office passed 
a dealer’s gallery. Pictures were exposed 
in the window, but he had paid no heed 
to them. Then one day appeared a sub¬ 
ject of hunting dogs. Hunting was his 
hobby. Hm ! Pretty good dogs to shoot 
over! And that scrubby grass and the 
wood beyond—many a time he had 
tramped such country! And that early 
morning mist—he could feel the tang 
of the air and imagine a tingle in his 
blood. Strange that a picture could stir 
such sensations! He had another look 
at it on returning from business, and 
another look next day, and the more 
he looked, the more he could see in the 
picture and feel in it. He ended by 
buying it. Without advice, trusting to 
his own instinct he made his first ven¬ 
ture as a collector. Today he knows 
that the picture from a technical stand¬ 
point was rather a poor one. An expert 
would have advised against buying it. 
But my friend does not regret his mis¬ 
take. Indeed, I would say that he made 
no mistake. For hint, at that stage of 
his appreciation, the picture was the 
right one to buy, because it meant so 
much to him. It would have been dif¬ 
ferent if he had been spending some 
one else’s money or were buying for 
others, say for a museum. Then he 
would have been in the position of a 
trustee, bound to do the best for his 
client and not justified in simply fol¬ 
lowing his own impulse. But he was 
buying for himself; and his mistake 
would have been if, like a child with 
arrested growth, he had stopped at that 
stage and gone on buying indifferent 
pictures. But, once started, he set him¬ 
self to a real study of pictures. Knowl¬ 
edge and feeling alike were developed 
and today he is a connoisseur as well 
as a lover of pictures. 
Long since he has discovered that the 
chief interest of a picture does not lie 
in its subject, but in its capacity of ex¬ 
pression. It expresses the artist’s vision 
of life—as he actually sees it or as he 
chooses to imagine it—and communi¬ 
cates the emotion to ourselves. If it is 
an emotion to which our own experience 
of life responds vividly, the picture 
means much to us. When such a pic¬ 
ture also exhibits what you have learned 
to recognize as technical merit, you will 
wisely wish to possess it. 
As to Price 
The question of price I have not 
touched upon so far. It is a wide sub¬ 
ject and here I have space only to sug¬ 
gest that there are two standards ot 
price—the market standard, affected by 
fashions of taste and by competition, 
and the personal standard determined 
by your own feeling of the picture’s 
value to yourself. In buying a picture 
you are making an investment. The 
motive of the investment may be of the 
market kind that looks for a rise in 
money value, or it may be of the per¬ 
sonal kind that seeks to return chiefly 
or solely in the immediate and enduring 
pleasure of possessing what will enhance 
the beauty and interest of your own 
life. The choice between th two rests 
with yourself. 
