EXQUISITE DESIGN ON A FINE YOKUT INDIAN BASKET.
In the matter of these designs the white race has much it may learn from the Indian. Sometimes I have looked upon the patterns and colors of our wallpapers, our rugs, our carpets, our chintzs, our calicoes, and especially upon the wool work or embroidery of some women, and have been compelled to ask myself if hideousness could be carried to any further extent. Some of the designs were the absolute delirium tremens of craziness,—conventionality reconventionalized again and again, until it was made unlike to anything in “the heavens above, the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth.”
A MISSION INDIAN BASKET OF GOOD DESIGN.
I was once lecturing to a “civilized” and “cultivated” audience upon this subject of Indian designs that have a personal meaning, and when I got through I heard one highly civilized and cultivated man exclaim in disgust: “Why, he’ll soon try to make us believe that our own wall-paper patterns ought to mean something!”
A CHEMEHUEVI BASKET OF BEAUTIFUL FORM AND DESIGN.
Most certainly I will! The idea that we, the superior, the wise race, use designs in our goods that are supposed to be beautiful to us, and yet that have no meaning! What absurdity and foolishness for our girls and women to spend hours on “fancy-work” (!), the designs of which are a crazy, intricate something to be dreaded rather than admired. The Indians have more sense than to waste their time over such foolishness. They have studied Nature in all her varying forms, and their minds are stored up with a thousand and one designs which they can transfer at pleasure to their basketry, pottery, or blanketry. I have had the pleasure of teaching this basic principle of art work to many white women, and I learned it from the Indian. One woman wanted to get a design for her sofa pillows. I asked her if she had no flowering vine over her porch. She said “Yes.” “Then copy its leaf and flower,” was my reply, and when she did so, and saw the beauty of the design she had created from Nature, her soul was filled with a new joy, and she wrote me that few things had given her more pleasure than the discovery of that basic principle.
