House and Garden 
more distinction and originality will his work pos¬ 
sess, but behind all his apparent contradictions and 
audacities will he discovered his deference to the 
law as set forth. Lesser men can always, by con¬ 
forming to this law, secure for their work at least 
safety and the avoidance of glaring error. 
If the artist, then, is the only person really qual¬ 
ified to make good arrangements and composi¬ 
tions, considering that he, even, is by no means 
infallible, the chances of success, which remain 
to the rest of humanity, may well seem discoura- 
gingly small. A famous teacher of art once said, 
apropos of household art, that “ in order to have 
art in the home, one must have an artist in the 
home.” This is the same discouraging thought, 
but more often than one might at first imagine, 
there is an artist, a rudimentary one at least, in 
the house. For this same teacher at another time 
said: “Whoever does any one thing supremely 
well, even sweeping a room in the best possible 
way, is an artist.” Old George Herbert had the 
same idea when he wrote, 
“ Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, 
Makes that and th’ action fine.” 
There are several points of view from which 
the hanging of pictures might be studied; con¬ 
siderations of proper light are important and still 
more so is the question whether a given picture 
is worthy to be displayed. And that brings up 
another question as to whether it is justifiahle to 
use a picture, poor in itself simply as a unit to give 
interest to an unbroken wall surface, regardless 
of its intrinsic value. But these are outside our 
purpose which is rather to study arrangement, 
taking for granted proper light and the merits of 
the picture. The whole problem of the proper 
placing of movable pictures is one that has grown 
up in comparatively modern times as a part of our 
return to nomadic life. The decoration of walls 
with painted pictures is certainly as old as civiliza¬ 
tion and perhaps older, but they were all painted 
on the walls. The Egyptians covered their wall 
surfaces entirely with pictures and painted patterns. 
The Greeks with their superior feeling for dis¬ 
tinction saw that a surface decorated by a picture 
or a pattern, gained immensely in effectiveness 
if it was contrasted with plain surfaces and although 
there are now no Greek pictures in existence, we 
must believe that their walls were painted in panels 
of simple color with pictures painted on the panels 
and framed either in simple mouldings, similar 
to those about their doors and windows, or sur¬ 
rounded by bands of contrasting color. In the 
museums at Rome and at Pompeii, there are exam¬ 
ples of late Roman work done probably by Greek 
artisans, showing the latter treatment. Often the 
panel about the picture is elaborated by an inferior 
hand, and the picture itself is the work of an artist 
of higher rank, and there are evidences to show 
that pictures by great painters were brought from 
Greece and set into specially designed spaces of 
the walls of Roman palaces. We know that port¬ 
able pictures, probably framed, existed though 
none remain now, but they were the exception. 
Nearly all pictures in classic times were painted 
on the walls as the part of a decoration for that 
space and no other. This general scheme of 
making a picture a part of the wall predominated 
through the Middle Ages, down to the fourteenth 
century when portable or easel pictures began 
to be more common. The prototype of the easel 
picture was the framed portable altar piece in two 
or more folding panels or leaves, which may very 
well have been a direct descendant from the Greek 
portable pictures, along with the other traditions 
of painting preserved in the Greek Church. From 
the middle of the fifteenth century after the develop¬ 
ment of printing and engraving, the ease with 
which prints could be multiplied must have enor¬ 
mously increased the number of small movable 
framed pictures. Portraits by that time had become 
popular, but in all houses of any pretension even 
portraits were carefully designed as to size and 
shape to fit some special space or some architectural 
setting, such as a panel in wainscoting. This we 
know from the careful specifications in the old 
contracts as well as from existing examples. By 
the seventeenth century small pictures seem to 
have been produced in large numbers, much as 
our modern pictures are with the size and shape 
left to the caprice of the painter, and the placing 
of pictures became as now more a matter of indi¬ 
vidual taste and less a part of an architectural 
scheme, but all through the eighteenth century, 
especially in France, where life was more ele¬ 
gant and refined than in other countries, all interior 
walls of houses of people above the lower ranks 
were given an architectural treatment, wTich in¬ 
cluded spaces designed to be painted by the great 
decorative artists of the day. 
Photography and the mechanical reproductive 
processes have in the last fifty or sixty years 
made it possible for everyone to own pictures in 
such abundance that the tendency has been to 
pack them closely together with little other idea 
of arrangement than to cover up as much of the 
wall as possible. Although we have agreed to 
stick to the question of hanging pictures and take 
their merit for granted, it is difficult to altogether 
avoid this subject. For there are, too often, so 
very many bad pictures displayed that swamp the 
few good ones associated with them, that it cannot 
be amiss to suggest as a first principle of common 
sense that the more important a picture is the more 
it should be isolated. The too prevalent idea 
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