House and Garden 
It frequently happens where a picture is large 
and a wall space small, that the problem is simply 
the placing of a single picture on a wall. This 
naturally offers little chance for variety. If the 
natural instinct for balance and symmetry were 
consulted, the picture would be placed exactly 
in the middle of the wall and following one’s natural 
sense of fitness at such a height from the floor, 
that neither a person standing nor a person sitting 
would see the picture distorted by foreshortening. 
That would bring the centre of a moderate sized 
picture somewhat below the eye of a person stand¬ 
ing. Pictures, as a rule, are placed too high, seldom 
too low, to be seen to the best advantage. 
All this may seem self-evident, but it is a pecu¬ 
liarity of the complicated modern temperament 
to mistrust the self-evident and to dislike simplicity. 
“I like it because it’s different”; says one of Mr. 
Burgess’s Bromides. Certainly it is praiseworthy 
to like distinction, but to be 
merely different is to be bi¬ 
zarre, and what can be more 
vulgar and pretentious! 
One of the keenest and 
most refreshing pleasures of 
the modern world has come 
from the study of Japanese 
art. A part of this pleasure, 
no doubt, is because it is “so 
different,” but its real power 
lies in its infinite refinement 
and distinction. One of its 
characteristics is its apparent 
disregard of symmetry, but 
careful study reveals a very 
beautifully adjusted system of 
veiled balances which satisfy 
the sense of equilibrium with¬ 
out being obvious to the 
casual eye. But this appar¬ 
ent disregard of symmetry 
has appealed to some lawless 
instinct in the popular sense 
and the sentiment of the hour 
has been that anything like 
formality or symmetry was 
“set” and that to be “loose” 
and “ free” and unbalanced 
was artistic in everything per¬ 
taining to arrangement. The 
arrangement of pictures has 
shared in this reign of chaos 
and the most diverse shapes, 
colors and sizes have been 
juxtaposed in accordance 
with the one underlying 
law, to avoid all law, which 
in another direction reached its extreme manifesta¬ 
tion in the felicitously named “crazy-quilt” and its 
translation into stained glass. 
We must trust that this strange outbreak against 
the laws of taste is only a passing ripple from the great 
wave of unrest sweeping over the modern world. 
It must be admitted that it is man’s nature to tire 
of everything and there is a special pleasure and 
relief in escaping from the old obvious symmetry 
of the Western civilization into that from the East, 
which is so much more suggestive and mysterious, 
but it is too subtle and too little understood to be 
used successfully here except by a few highly trained 
and specially gifted artists, and it is out of harmony 
except in an environment specially created for it. 
Perhaps the best example ever produced outside 
of the East was the famous “Peacock Room,” now 
dismantled, designed by Whistler for the London 
house of Mr. Val Princeps. This was ostensibly 
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