Page:The museum, (Jackson, Marget Talbot, 1917).djvu/106

84 the same color be used with equally good effect for sculpture and painting.

Of the many successfully decorated galleries to be seen in Europe, among the most typical is the new picture gallery of the Vatican, where a deep earthy-green moire covers the walls and harmonizes delightfully with the Italian walnut of the woodwork. Perhaps no more successful single example of gallery decoration exists than this. The color brings out all the most beautiful tones in the pictures, the design is enough to give variety, but not enough to be disturbing. The whole atmosphere is that of refined simplicity, a very rare attribute of a picture gallery. One European gallery made the tremendous mistake of thinking that a color which did not appear in any of the pictures would be the most successful background. The room contains paintings by Rubens, Snyders, and other Flemish artists of that time, in whose pictures red predominates. The color chosen for the walls was also a red, but one which did not appear in any of the paintings. The effect was terrible. Almost any of the reds used in the pictures would have been better.

In a certain German museum there are two rooms which will serve as illustrations of the good and the bad in the use of daring colors for