48 
House 
& Garden 
DECORATING OUR FOUR WALLS 
By Filling Them with Portraits of Past Houses and Gardens l hey Create a Livable 
Atmosphere and Make Distinguished Backgrounds 
MURIEL HARRIS 
Hewitt 
with its fidgety designs, still a 
welcome relief from the old pea 
soup decoration or the heavy crim¬ 
son, suggestive of after-dinner 
apoplexy; black walls and gold 
walls and silver walls and so on. 
The change came rather grad¬ 
ually. There was the precedent of 
the Italian painted walls and ceil¬ 
ing, which were easily too 
cheruby, too blue-skyish. Also, 
Botticellis and Michael Angelos 
were not to be had for the asking. 
There was the French paneling 
upon which Louis Quinze parrots 
and tulips flirted gaily. This was 
all very well for a boudoir or a 
parlor. The designs were con¬ 
ventionalized and so did not de¬ 
mand attention enough to become 
boring. 
There was the Futurist wall 
painting — all lightning and 
(Continued on page 66) 
When it came to decorating her 
bedroom walls, Mrs. Stevens 
covered them with views of 
her former garden. The orig¬ 
inal is shown above 
T HE decoration of our four walls has 
ever been an entrancing problem, 
whether to the child, to whom they are 
clearly surfaces made for scribbling, or to the 
Medici, who outran the conventions of his 
time by placing upon his walls Botticelli s 
Primavera. Walls have always been dec¬ 
orated or deliberately not decorated, have even, 
in the gold-frame era, been “furnished.’’ The 
difficulty now is to decide between the respec¬ 
tive merits say, of Egyptian mural paintings 
and the Japanese blank walls with their re¬ 
movable kakemonos or, better still, to evolve 
something new. 
Wall decoration might be divided into two 
main classes—the movable and the permanent, 
and the two schemes have alternated fairly 
regularly, whether in the form of the old tem¬ 
pera church paintings or the worst floral de¬ 
sign beloved of the paper hanger. 
The picture itself is, of course, really only 
wall decoration in a movable form and able to 
survive change or damage to the building. It 
is not so long ago since pictures were regarded 
purely as wall furniture and a blank space 
created horror in the mind of the beholder. 
Then came the reaction of the blank wall and 
the black-frame etching; the Morris wall paper 
On a previous estate 
Mrs. Robert Stevens 
created this formal 
setting for a pool. 
She later copied it 
on her newer place 
at Bernard sville, 
N. V. 
Hartln>? 
