House and Garden 
Vol. X December, 1906 No. 6 
HOW TO HANG PICTURES 
By Herbert E. Everett 
Professor of the History of Fine Arts in the University of Pennsylvania 
TT is the women of the household who are most 
called upon to deal with problems of taste 
and they frequently show that they feel and apply 
the principles of arrangement in a more or less 
instinctive way. All art was at one time instinctive 
and all the old instinctive art was good. Just why 
it is so even the psychologists are not able to tell 
us, but sad it is and provokingly perverse that the 
more civilized, or perhaps it would be nearer 
right to say the more cultivated, the world has 
become the more rarely do we find instinctive good 
taste. To-day, practically, all instinctive art is 
confined to savages and semi-civilized people 
whose blankets, baskets, pottery and rugs are col¬ 
lected for their beauty by people of the most culti¬ 
vated taste. There is, however, the one exception 
“THE LAWRENCE ROOM ” OF THE BOSTON MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS 
This room is lined with a dark oak wainscot, taken from an English country house of the late sixteenth century. The panels over the mantels 
contain portraits painted to fit the spaces. Their beautiful harmony, as a part of the wainscot, is in striking contrast to the movable pictures above 
them whose sizes and character are so unrelated to the space they fill and to each other, that harmony is out of the question. Negative by Baldwin Coolidge. 
Copyright, 1906, by The John C. Winston Co. 
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