OF DECORATIVE PAINTING AND DESIGN
The term Decorative painting implies the existence of painting which is not decorative: a strange state of things for an art which primarily and pre-eminently appeals to the eye. If we look back to the times when the arts and crafts were in their most flourishing and vigorous condition, and dwelt together, like brethren, in unity—say to the fifteenth century—such a distinction did not exist. Painting only differed in its application, and in degree, not in kind. In the painting of a MS., of the panels of a coffer, of a ceiling, a wall, or an altar-piece, the painter was alike—however different his theme and conception—possessed with a paramount impulse to decorate, to make the space or surface he dealt with as lovely to the eye in design and colour as he had skill to do.
The art of painting has, however, become considerably differentiated since those days. We are here in the nineteenth century encumbered with many distinctions in the art. There is obviously much painting which is not decorative, or ornamental in any sense, which has indeed quite other objects. It may be the presentment of the more superficial natural facts, phases, or accidents of light; the pictorial dramatising of life or past history; the pointing of a moral; or the embodiment of romance and poetic thought or symbol. Not but what it is quite possible for a painter to deal with such things and yet to produce a work that shall be decorative.
A picture, of course, may be a piece of decorative art of the most beautiful kind; but to begin with, if it is an easel picture, it is not necessarily related to anything but itself: its painter is not bound to consider anything outside its own dimensions; and, indeed, the practice of holding large and mixed picture-shows has taught him the uselessness of so doing.
Then, too, the demand for literal presentment of the superficial facts or phases of nature often removes the painter and his picture still farther from the architectural, decorative, and constructive artist and the handicraftsman, who are bound to think of plan, and design, and materials—of the adaptation of their work, in short—while the painter seeks only to be an unbiassed recorder of all accidents and sensational conditions of nature and life,—and so we get our illustrated newspapers on a grand scale.
An illustrated newspaper, however, in spite of the skill and enterprise it may absorb, is not somehow a joy for ever; and, after all, if literalism and instantaneous appearances are the only things worth striving for in painting, the photograph beats any painter at that.
If truth is the object of the modern painter of pictures—truth as distinct from or opposed to beauty—beauty is certainly the object of the decorative painter, but beauty not necessarily severed from truth. Without beauty, however, decoration has no reason for existence; indeed it can hardly be said to exist.
Next to beauty, the first essential of a decoration is that it shall be related to its environment, that it shall express or acknowledge the conditions under which it exists. If a fresco on a wall, for instance, it adorns the wall without attempting to look like a hole cut in it through which something is accidentally seen; if a painting on a vase, it acknowledges the convexity of the shape, and helps to express instead of contradicting it; if on a panel in a cabinet or door, it spreads itself in an appropriate filling on an organic plan to cover it; being, in short, ornamental by its very nature, its first business is to ornament.