In nature all is useful, all is beautiful.
Emerson.
Along the centre of the vault, three medallions by Mr. William B. Van Ingen represent respectively Sculpture, Architecture, and Painting. In each the art is represented by a female figure engaged either in chiselling the features of a bust (that of Washington), drawing the plan of a building, or painting at an easel.
TOUCH.—BY ROBERT REID.
Mr. Reid’s Paintings.—Passing to the North Corridor, the attention is at once attracted to the brilliant coloring of Mr. Reid’s decorations in the vault and along the north wall. The former are five in number, and represent the Five Senses. They are octagonal in form, measuring within an inch of six feet and a half across. The order of the subjects, beginning at the westerly end, is Taste, Sight, Smell, Hearing, Touch. In each the sense suggested is represented by a beautiful young woman, more of the modern than the antique type of beauty, and clad in drapery which recalls contemporary fashions rather than the classic conventions which are usually followed by artists in their treatment of ideal subjects. Being painted upon a ceiling, so that the visitor is required to look directly upward in order to study them, the figures, though, in a sense, represented as seated, are rather to be imagined as poised in the air, without any special reference to the law of gravitation. They are shown as supported upon cloud-banks, and the backgrounds of the panels are sky and clouds.
The suggestion of the subject is as simply as it is ingeniously and unconventionally conveyed. A large portion of this suggestion must be looked for, of course, in the expression of the face and the attitude as well as in the action of the figures. Taste is shown drinking from a shell. She is surrounded by foliage, and a vine grows beside her laden with bunches of ripe grapes. She wears flowers in her hair, and the idea throughout may perhaps be taken as that of the autumnal feast of the wine-press. Sight is looking at her reflection in a handglass, and smiling with pleasure at the evidence of her beauty. A splendid peacock, the emblem of beauty and pride in beauty, is introduced beside her. Smell is represented seated beside a bank of lilies and roses. From this mass of flowers she has selected a great white rose, which she presses to her nose. Hearing holds a large sea-shell to her ear, and dreamily listens to its roaring. Touch is delightedly observing a butterfly which has alighted on her bare outstretched arm—the touch of its tiny feet as it walks over her flesh imparting an unaccustomed sensation to her nerves. A setter dog, which she has just ceased from caressing, lies asleep behind her.
Mr. Reid’s subjects in the four circular panels along the wall are entitled, in order from left to right: Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge, and Philosophy. Each is represented by a half-length seated female figure—more solidly painted, but of much the same type as the figures representing The Senses—holding a scroll, book, or tablet. In the panel of Philosophy, a Greek temple is seen in the background, emblematic of the Greek origin of philosophy.
HEARING.—BY ROBERT REID.