Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/195

MURAL PAINTING where the architect dropped it, and carry the same motive to still greater heights of beauty. Its first and most important function, therefore, is purely decorative, to fill and satisfy the eye with a surface of graceful line and sensuous and beautiful color. And the mural decorator who forgets this cardinal fact or is temperamentally incapable of working within the prescribed limits, should devote himself to some other line of art. It will be seen, therefore, that the rigid and enforced conditions under which the mural painter works impose upon him great reserve in his scale of color and of values. If he were to use the full scale of either (or anything approaching it), he would inevitably produce the illusion of the easel picture, which it is essential to avoid. His wall surface would apparently disappear, and one of the chief [149]