Could quench our hearth-fire’s ruddy glow.”
For the sake of restfulness to the eye, the walls and carpet should be neutral in tone, making a good background to the family figures; the wall paper being of a good all-overish pattern that will not detract from pictures that may hang on it, and the carpet or rug well mixed, of not too loud a pattern, and without strong contrasts of light and dark. Blue wall papers are hard to deal with, but creams, fawns, soft greenish or olive-grays, and simple leaf patterns with slight variations of color or shade are all good for walls that are to be hung with pictures, as a sitting room should be. Common butchers’ paper, put on in sheets, the better textured cartridge paper, or sheathing paper with a pretty variation introduced by way of frieze or dado are all restful to the eye and good for the sitting room walls. The greens used should not be sharp and crude, but should be modified, making them yellowish, bluish, or grayish. So with reds, which will be better yellowish, slightly bluish (not purplish), or brownish; and yellows which must be modified into creams, old-golds, or fawns. This rule is for large surfaces. A little pure, bright color can be introduced here and there by way of decoration, and must appear somewhere in the room if it is to have a cheerful look, but wait till your pictures are hung before you introduce much brilliant color. It may take the life out of them. Picture-rods are a great convenience, and, after the first expense, save much trouble, and much marring of walls by driving nails. The picture-rod should run below the frieze, and a box of picture-hooks of suitable size for the rods should be kept ready to hand, and picture-wire so that a new painting or engraving when it comes home may find its place at once and not stand on the floor for a month waiting till the master can drive a nail. As for the wall decorations, there should be a looking-glass for family convenience either in this parlor or the entry way (the parlor is the better place), and the best pictures the house affords, always making sure that they are good pictures. Better always a good photograph, or wood-cut, or etching, than a poor chromo, steel engraving, or water-color; and better, a hundred fold, a good water-color than a poor oil painting. If your family portraits are poor, consign them to the garret or the upstairs hall, but, if possible, have at least one good painting in your home-room, even if it does cost money; and remember that a first-hand sketch by a good living artist is better than a second-hand copy of an old master. But one good painting in a house, whether a copy or an original, is a continual art lesson. A woman of taste will not mix all manner of pictures together on one wall. If possible, she will keep oil paintings by themselves, and not put them in juxtaposition with water-colors—nor will she put a picture suited only to a gallery in a family sitting room. Nor will she put Bacchantes in the same group with worshiping cherubs. There is a vast deal of stuff purely ephemeral that women are apt to load their walls with—Christmas, New Year, Easter and birthday cards, and painted panels, which may do very well to exhibit during the holidays or the day or two after the birthday; then, having had their day, they should cease to obtrude if not to be. There should be a box or receptacle for all this clutter; such souvenirs are admirable for their suggestions to the amateur decorator or embroiderer of the family, but they should not be allowed to spot the walls, to hang from the side brackets or to decorate the looking-glass. “God bless our home” is a devout aspiration which is better carried out in a godly life than worked in cross-stitch and hung over the sitting room door. I have seen Scripture texts deftly inwrought into the mural decoration of a sea-side cottage, verses from the sailors’ Psalm being painted in a decorative way between border lines of frieze or dado, where they did not seem out of place, but the summer boarders were well nigh driven from another cottage because of a card-board abomination hung over the mantel piece of their sitting room, with indigo clouds and grass-green waves, with a three-quarters-length Christ in all colors of the rainbow uttering the magic words worked in shaded reds—“Peace, Be Still.” The matter of mottoes has been overdone, and it is always safe to leave them out altogether.
Paintings upon plush must be exceedingly good to make them worth hanging anywhere. Usually such decoration is a waste of expensive material. Any way, plush is too easily spoiled by dust or careless handling to make it welcome in the family room. Painting upon picture and looking-glass frames is another misuse of decoration. A London artist with rare ingenuity paints a stalk of lilies to hide a flaw in his hall mirror, and straightway the “Decorative Art” salesrooms all over our land effloresce with blooming mirror frames whose unpruned vines straggle and trail over every glass. The beauty of a mirror is to have it absolutely clear and free from dust and dirt, finger marks or paint blotches, throughout its entire surface. Flower painting in polychrome upon frames and easels is utterly out of place, as it calls the eye off from the picture which the frame or easel holds, and reminds one of a servant decked out in finery surreptitiously borrowed from her mistress’s wardrobe.
Marble mantel pieces, to be good, must be expensive. A simple pine mantel piece with a little incised ornament is far better than white or cold gray marble. Raised, stuck-on ornament is objectionable, whether in wood or stone, but mantel pieces, book-cases and cabinets give a fine opportunity for domestic carving, and one can but wonder that more home ingenuity is not expended on the construction and carving of mantels and other woodwork in our rooms, such as doors and windows. I have seen a wooden mantel piece small, plain, and somewhat cheap and inferior-looking, so improved by a little carving, judiciously introduced by the man of the house—a small panel set in here, and the edge of the shelf prettily finished—that the whole thing grew dignified at once and became a worthy ornament of the “spare room,” when painted in harmony with the rest of the woodwork. The youngest whittlers might be taught to use tools for the family good, if parents were only willing to go to a little trouble and expense in providing models, tools and wood for their use, and a comfortable chimney nook where the work could be carried on. In the schools of Philadelphia Mr. Leland has shown how much may be done by boys and girls when their efforts are wisely directed.
When there is no room in the house specially set apart as a library, cabinets and book cases form an important part of the sitting room furniture. I would have book shelves of some sort in every room of a house; but in the room where the family gathers there should be a special shelf for books of reference. An encyclopædia is of as much value to the household as a wood lot is to the farm. Better wear your old silk gown or shabby overcoat another year, or two years even, and have your book of reference always at hand for the general good. The unabridged dictionary is a necessity, and should stand in its rack easy of access to school children and their elders as well. A household book of poetry, Dana’s or Bryant’s, or whatever may be better, and an equally comprehensive volume of religious verse like Gilman’s, or Palgrave’s choice “Golden Treasury,” should be well thumbed by the children, and should be placed temptingly at hand, not locked behind glass doors. Glazed doors are demanded by collectors who revel in vellum, uncut leaves, and rare editions, but cases that are well backed and that have leathern, or even moreen or flannel, valences tacked to the shelves, will serve well enough to protect books in a house where all the reading matter is for daily use or study.
A low book case three or four feet high and broad enough to fill a generous wall space, running, if need be, across one side of the room, may be found ample enough for a family whose library is limited. Pictures and vases can be ranged upon its top. I know a room that holds three or four such book cases of ebonized pine, filled with books and made gay with valences of scarlet moreen, which yet scorns to be called “the library,” and is only known as the family “sitting room.” Valences of leather or wool are sufficient to protect the books from dust if the cases are well backed.
In addition to the book case, hanging shelves for children’s books, or cabinets for collections of any sort, can be made of pine, and when absolutely plain, if neatly varnished, need not prove unsightly. They may even be made very ornamental by a bright curtain, plain or embroidered, with rings attached that run lightly over a brass rod or wire, and screen the contents of the shelves from the too inquisitive eye.
It is really a happy day for a household when one of its members develops a hobby and begins to make a collection—not of buttons or business cards, but of something on which genuine study will not come amiss, and there is hardly any line in which one is likely to interest himself where he may not often pick up for a mere trifle much that will be of special value to his collection, much that, by itself, would be comparatively worthless, but which in a collection has added worth and dignity; and any collection makes a new point of interest in a home. In a quiet country town where I once lived, the boys of the village took to collecting butterflies and insects. Farmers carried turpentine or benzine in their pockets, and would come home from their haying fields with hats gay with the captured moths and butterflies they were taking to the collectors of their several households. Thus homes hitherto utterly wanting in any æsthetic influence, seemed to brighten into something positively charming, when father and mother, son and daughter clustered about the drawers in the front parlor, exhibiting to any chance visitor the fragile treasures so carefully arranged within them, and when a new specimen was captured the collector would
“Run it o’er and o’er with greedy view,
And look and look again, as he would look it through.”