But a harmonious effect is always more difficult with mixed materials (which may account in some degree for the marked success of “the tulip and the bird” in modern decorative patterns).
Certain material conditions, too, favour the growth of a higher type of art at one period than another. We can never elude the economic basis which necessarily affects our forms of art as of other things.
“Pictures, furniture, and effects” is the auctioneer’s favourite phrase in describing the property of a gentleman. He might be describing pictures alone. We have heard of “furniture pictures”—but remove the reproach, is it not in the fitness of things that pictures should be furniture, and their highest destiny to decorate a room?
But when pictures become counters in the game of speculation, your decorative relations along with your social relations may take care of themselves. They become, in fact, very poor relations.
The portability of the easel picture may have something to do with its unrelatable character in some cases. Destined for nowhere in particular as a rule, it goes on tour—a member of a performing and often very diverse company, to all the provincial towns, and even on the continent. Yet there were portable and even folding pictures in classical and mediaeval times, and certainly there was no want of decorative relationship in the latter period when, as we know, they were often most beautiful pieces of furniture and wall decorations, as well as pictures. Even the gold-framed oil picture was frankly treated by the Venetians as a decoration—and a ceiling decoration—as witness the Tintorettos in the Ducal palace.
It would not be difficult to select pictures from the National Gallery from the Italian, Flemish, and even the Dutch and Spanish schools, which would not only be admirable pieces of decoration but also furnish the decorator with beautiful decorative schemes of colour.
An easel picture might be made the central point of its own scheme of colour and tone, and led up to, as it were, by everything in the room.
There may be, as I have said already, room for the open sky in decoration, too, if you “sky” it enough, or put it in a frieze, and this touches a rather important point of decorative relationship, too often ignored by the hanger of easel pictures, that is the placing of the picture so that its horizon or vanishing point shall be on a level with the eye of the spectator.
Checked by such considerations, and due selection of scale and tone in placing pictures, I would not say that decorative effects are not possible with the most easel of easel pictures—only you must add the decorator to the painter to bring them off.
