Old coloured prints need narrow black passepartout, while broad passepartout in pink, blue or pale green to match the leading tone in wall paper makes your quaint, old black-and-white prints very decorative.
Never use white margins on any pictures unless your walls are white.
The decorative value of any picture when hung, is dependent upon its background, the height at which it is hung, its position with regard to the light, its juxtaposition to other pictures, and the character of those other pictures—that is, their subjects, colour and line.
If you are buying pictures to hang in a picture gallery, there is nothing to consider beyond the attraction of the individual picture in mind. But if you are buying a picture to hang on the walls of a room which you are furnishing, you have first to consider it as pure decoration; that is, to ask yourself if in colour, period and subject it carries out the idea of your room.
A modern picture is usually out of place in a room furnished with antiques. In the same way a strictly modern room is not a good setting for an old picture, if toned by time.
If you own or would own a modern portrait or landscape and it is the work of an artist, and beautiful in colour, why not "star" it,—build your room up to it? If you decide to do this, see that everything else representing colour is either subservient to the picture, or if of equal value as to colour, that they harmonise perfectly with the picture in mind.
PLATE XII
From a studio one enters a smaller room, one side of which is shown here, a veritable Italian Louis XVI salon.