Carnegie Art Institute, Pittsburg
ARRANGEMENT IN BLACK: SENOR PABLO SARASATE.
Light now flits phantom-like across the masterpieces of pictorial delineation, but it is still the great elixir of art, that will give life to any scene and animate any object. No special method can be indicated. Every worker must be his own pioneer and pathfinder. The new era of light is yet in a primitive stage. It is a lonely art whose language is understood but by the few, though we have approached the hour of dawn before the awakening. Life may seem dreary and colourless to us, yet we should realize that only one beam of light is needed to change it into a vision of beauty.
To Rembrandt even the Bree-straat in Amsterdam, resplendent in his time of Oriental culture and Moorish pomp, may have seemed dull and colourless. He had to create for himself a distant and enchanted realm from out the prosaic world in which he lived. And so must every ambitious artist dream himself far away from the grey of everyday life and construct a poetic world for himself alone.
Light is, after all, objective and merely suggestive. The artist's mind must serve as some Faustean retort, which will turn these suggestions into the soft gleams and sparkling shimmers of art. Whistler was one of the few to accomplish the task.
CHAPTER VI
SYMPHONIES IN INTERIOR DECORATION
William Morris demanded that our entire environment should be beautiful. Only in moments of superior enjoyment do we realize the significance of human life, and by a poem, picture or sonata we construct the symbols that bring us closest to this appreciation. Why then not construct a candlestick, a chair, the surface of a wall, in such a way that they might be taken for symbols, to remind us of the existence of our soul? The candlestick shall no longer be a mere stand and holder for a candle but a souvenir of reminiscences. That is the philosophical idea that underlies all interior decoration and furnishing.
As Sheridan Ford so aptly expressed it in an article in "St. Stephen's Review" in 1889: