Instead of being smooth and white like those of previous World's Fairs, the buildings have the streaked texture of travertine stone, with a general coloring somewhat warmer than that of travertine. Domes, doorways and other architectural details are rich in soft greens and blues, and the whole group of buildings, viewed from the hills behind, resembles more than anything else a great architectural drawing by Jules Guérin, made into a reality. And that, in effect, is what it is, for Guérin has ruled over everything that has to do with color, from the roads which will have a warm reddish tone, to the mural decorations and the lighting.
The exposition will hold certain records from the start. It will be the first great exposition ever held in a seaport. It will be, if I mistake not, the first to be ready on time. It will be the first held to celebrate a contemporaneous event, and its contemporaneousness will be reflected in its exhibitions, for, with the exception of a loan collection of art, nothing will be shown which has not been produced since the St. Louis Exposition of 1904. Also, I am informed, it is the first American exposition to have an appropriation for mural paintings. True, there were mural paintings at the Chicago World's Fair, but they were not provided for by appropriation, having been paid for by the late Frank Millet, with money saved from other things.
Of the painters who will have mural decorations at the Exposition, but one, Frank Brangwyn, is not an American. Also, but one is a Californian, that one being Arthur F. Mathews.
The only mural decorations in the Fine Arts Building will be eight enormous panels by Robert Reid, in the interior of the dome, eighty feet above the floor. Four of the panels symbolize Art; the others the "four golds of California": poppies, citrus fruits, metallic gold and golden wheat. Among the various excursions to the Exposition, I hope there will be one for old-school mural decorators—men who paint stiff central figures in brick-red robes, enthroned, and surrounded by cog-wheels, propellers, and bales of cotton, with the invariable male figures petrified at a forge upon one side, and the invariable inert mothers and children upon the other—I hope there will be an excursion to take such painters out and show them the brave swirl and sweep of line, the light, and the nacreous color which this artist has thrown into his decorations at the Fair.
Aside from the work of Mr. Reid, Edward Simmons has done two large frieze panels of great beauty, Frank Vincent Du Mond, two others, Childe Hassam, a lunette in most exquisite tones, and William de Leftwich Dodge, Milton H. Bancroft and Charles Holloway, other canvases, so that, the finished exposition will be fairly jeweled with mural paintings.
It is hard to write about expositions and mural paintings, without seeming to infringe upon the prerogatives of Baedeker, and it is particularly difficult to do so if one has happened to be shown about by a professional shower-about of the singularly voluble type we encountered at the Exposition.
To the reader who has followed my companion and me in our peregrinations, now drawing to a close, it will be unnecessary to say that by the time we reached the Pacific Coast, we believed we had encountered every kind of "booster" that creeps, crawls, walks, crows, cries, bellows, barks or brays.
But we had not. It remained for the San Francisco Exposition to show us a new specimen, the most amazing, the most appalling, the most unbelievable of all: the booster who talks like a book.
It was on the day before we left for home that we were delivered up to him. We had been keeping late hours, and were tired in a happy, drowsy sort of way, so that the prospect of being wafted through the morning sunshine to the exposition grounds, in an open automobile, and cruising about, among the buildings, without alighting, and without care or worry, was particularly pleasing to us.
The automobile came at the appointed hour, and with it the being who was to be our pilot. Full of confidence and trust, we got into the car, but we had not proceeded more than a few blocks, and heard our cicerone speak more than a few hundred thousand words, before our bosoms became filled with that "vague unrest" which, though you may never have experienced it yourself, you have certainly read about before.