Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/107

Rh engravings diminish the luminous quality of paintings; yet there are people who hang paintings and engravings in the same room. Again, there are others who would not do that, but who will hang paintings together of which the style and sentiment are so absolutely incongruous that they can not avoid conflict, and require entirely different moods of mind for the right appreciation of them. Suppose you have a gravely furnished room, a library, and one or two portraits in it of thoughtful and serious men painted soberly and in quiet color, would it not evidently be a great mistake to admit into that room any picture whatever that should disturb the pensive tranquillitytranquility [sic] of the place? Fancy the effect if you admitted a gaudy modern portrait of an overdressed lady with a smirk upon her face as she sat happy in her glare and glitter of millinery and trinkets! There ought to be in every room a certain prevailing note or mood of the human mind whatever it may be, and everything should be kept subordinate to that one dominant idea, with sufficient variety to avoid dullness, but without transgression of the limits prescribed by the idea. In a word, let us have ideal unity; let us avoid the incongruous. A room may contain different works of art, but, in a comprehensive sense, it is a work of art in itself, and the first necessity for every work of art is unity. If it is decided that the note of the room is to be cheerfulness, it is easy to keep faithful to that. Light in itself is an element of cheerfulness, so the wall-paper will be light. Water-colors are more cheerful than oil-paintings, because water-color painting is apparently slighter and more rapid; it conveys better the idea of felicitous dexterity. Watercolors, too, may have margins, and the white of the margins gives much light and gayety to a room. The frames must be gilded, because nothing is so cheerful as gilding; but they must not be heavy, because massiveness is oppressive to the imagination. The pictures themselves should be generally light, and the coloring as bright and gay as it can be without crudity. In such a room we do not want melancholy landscapes or solemn-looking personages, but we want blue skies and sunshine, merrily rippling waters, human life in youth or healthy maturity, happy in activity and love, not burdened with care and sorrow—all in that sweet dream-land of the poetic imagination—

The opposite mood of thoughtful gravity is not by any means inferior as a motive, and it is more in consonance with the habitual feelings of mature age. The greatest of all artists have worked in the serious sense, and our noblest pictures, like our sweetest songs, "are those that tell of saddest thought," or, if not quite of the saddest, still of that quietly grave, reflective thought which is "far from all resort of mirth." Few paintings of the human face have such a permanent hold upon the memory, or are so often looked at, or for so many minutes at once, as that picture by Francia in the Louvre which is simply