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Plate 33.—Portion of Room Decoration, Sheen House, Surrey: Eighteenth Century.
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Plate 34.—Portion of a Staircase Decoration in the Victoria and Albert Museum. By F. W. Moody.
fine examples of hall decoration painted in fresco in England, as well as important pictorial and ornamental schemes of decoration in coloured plaster, mosaic, and in oil painting. We might mention the Houses of Parliament frescoes, those at South Kensington, the Royal Exchange wall pictures, the mosaics in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and in the new Cathedral at Westminster, as well as a good deal of coloured decoration in private houses and civic buildings throughout the country, but in the British Isles the advancement of this interesting and fascinating art is severely handicapped by the indifference, prejudice and obstinacy, even of many people who profess to have a love for art.
As a nation, we are a long way behind the French, Germans and Americans in the encouragement of decorative art. The Governments and municipalities of Germany and France decorate their civic and public buildings thoroughly, and with no niggard hand, but in our own countries such work, however good it may be, is commissioned for in a partial and piecemeal way, when it is decided to be done at all.