Pattern and Picture
At first sight it might appear as if there were an essential fundamental natural difference between a pattern and a picture, but when we come to consider it, it appears to be rather a distinction than a difference.
A pattern may be an arrangement of lines, forms, and a harmony of planes and tones of colour.
But these words would describe in general terms a picture also.
Certain recurrences of line and form; certain re-echoing notes of the same, or allied colour, are necessary to both pattern and picture. The abstract ingredients appear to be the same in both cases.
A picture indeed may be considered as a pattern of another sort, and the real difference is that whereas a pattern is not necessarily a picture, a picture is bound to be a pattern—a pattern having its quantities, its balance of masses, its connecting lines, its various planes, its key of colour, its play of contrasts, its harmony of tones.
Technically, a picture may be considered as an informal pattern, mainly of tone and values; while a pattern may be considered as a formal pattern, mainly of planes of colour.
The ancient art of the East was all frankly pattern-work, whatever the subject pictured. Egyptian, Persian, Indian, Chinese, Moorish and Arabian art, in all their varieties, show the dominating sense of pattern, and the invention of the instinctive decorators in the use of colour.
The Japanese, also, are instinctive decorators, though in a less formal and more impressionistic way, and with much more naturalistic feeling. Their pictures printed from colour blocks, as well as their "kakimonos," painted on silk, are frankly pattern-pictures, the pattern motive being quite as strong or stronger than the graphic or representative motive.
Mediæval and early Renaissance painting in Europe was frankly more or less formal and of the nature of ornament, and even in its freest and fullest development, in the works of the great masters of the sixteenth century of Venice and Florence, a certain decorative or architectural feeling was never forgotten.