Principles of Home Decoration
CHAPTER VIII
WALLS, CEILINGS, AND FLOORS
The true principle of wall treatment is to make the boundary stand for colour
and beauty, and not alone for division of space.
As a rule, the colour treatment of a house interior must begin with the
walls, and it is fortunate if these are blank and plain as in most new houses
with uncoloured ceilings, flat or broken with mouldings to suit the style of the
house.
The range of possible treatment is very wide, from simple tones of wall
colour against which quiet cottage or domestic city life goes on, to the
elaboration of walls of houses of a different grade, where stately pageants are
a part of the drama of daily life. But having shown that certain rules are
applicable to both, and indeed necessary to success in both, we may choose
within these rules any tint or colour which is personally pleasing.
Rooms with an east or west light may carry successfully tones of any shade,
without violating fundamental laws.
The first impression of a room depends upon the walls. In fact, rooms are
good or bad, agreeable or ugly in exact accordance with the wall-quality and
treatment. No richness of floor-covering, draperies, or furniture can minimise
their influence.
Perhaps it is for this reason that the world is full of papers and other
devices for making walls agreeable; and we cannot wonder at this, when we
reflect that something of the kind is necessary to the aspect of the room, and
that each room effects for the individual exactly what the outer walls of the
house effect for the family, they give space for personal privacy and for that
reserve of the individual which is the earliest effect of luxury and comfort.
It is certain that if walls are not made agreeable there is in them something
of restraint to the eye and the sense which is altogether disagreeable. Apparent
confinement within given limits, is, on the whole, repugnant to either the
natural or civilised man, and for this reason we are constantly tempted to
disguise the limit and to cover the wall in such a way as shall interest and
make us forget our bounds. In this case, the idea of decoration is, to make the
walls a barrier of colour only, instead of hard, unyielding masonry; to take
away the sense of being shut in a box, and give instead freedom to thought and
pleasure to the sense.
It is the effect of shut-in-ness which the square and rigid walls of a room
give that makes drapery so effective and welcome, and which also gives value to
the practice of covering walls with silks or other textiles. The softened
surface takes away the sense of restraint. We hang our walls with pictures, or
cover them with textiles, or with paper which carries design, or even colour
them with pigments—something—anything, which will disguise a restraining bound,
or make it masquerade as a luxury.
This effort or instinct has set in motion the machinery of the world. It has
created tapestries and brocades for castle and palace, and invented cheap
substitutes for these costly products, so that the smallest and poorest house as
well as the richest can cover its walls with something pleasant to the eye and
suggestive to the mind.
LARGE SITTING-ROOM IN "STAR ROCK" COUNTRY HOUSE
It is one of the privileges and opportunities of art to invent these
disguises; and to do it so thoroughly and successfully as to content us with
facts which would otherwise be disagreeable. And we do, by these various
devices, make our walls so hospitable to our thoughts that we take positive and
continual pleasure in them.
We do this chiefly, perhaps, by ministering to our instinctive love of colour;
which to many temperaments is like food to the hungry, and satisfies as
insistent a demand of the mind as food to the body.
At this late period of the world we are the inheritors of many methods of
wall disguise, from the primitive weavings or blanket coverings with which
nomadic peoples lined the walls of their tents, or the arras which in later days
covered the roughness and rudeness of the stone walls of kings and barons, to
the pictured tapestries of later centuries. This latter achievement of art
manufacture has outlived and far outweighed the others in value, because it more
perfectly performs the object of its creation.
Tapestries, for the most part, offer us a semblance of nature, and cheat us
with a sense of unlimited horizon. The older tapestries give us, with this,
suggestions of human life and action in out-of-door scenes sufficiently
unrealistic to offer a vague dream of existence in fields and forests. This
effectually diverts our minds from the confinements of space, and allows us the
freedom of nature.
Probably the true secret of the never-failing appreciation of tapestries—from
the very beginning of their history until this day—is this fact of their
suggestiveness; since we find that damasks of silk or velvet or other costly
weavings, although far surpassing tapestries in texture and concentration of
colour, yet lacking their suggestiveness to the mind, can never rival them in
the estimation of the world. Unhappily, we cannot count veritable tapestries as
a modern recourse in wall-treatment, since we are precluded from the use of
genuine ones by their scarcity and cost.
There is undoubtedly a peculiar richness and charm in a tapestry-hung wall
which no other wall covering can give; yet they are not entirely appropriate to
our time. They belong to the period of windy palaces and enormous enclosures,
and are fitted for pageants and ceremonies, and not to our carefully plastered,
wind-tight and narrow rooms. Their mission to-day is to reproduce for us in
museums and collections the life of yesterday, so full of pomp and almost
barbaric lack of domestic comfort. In studios they are certainly appropriate and
suggestive, but in private houses except of the princely sort, it is far better
to make harmonies with the things of to-day.
Nevertheless if the soul craves tapestries let them be chosen for intrinsic
beauty and perfect preservation, instead of accepting the rags of the past and
trying to create with them a magnificence which must be incomplete and shabby.
Considering, as I do, that tapestries belong to the life and conditions of the
past, where the homeless many toiled for the pampered few, and not to the homes
of to-day where the man of moderate means expects beauty in his home as
confidently as if he were a world ruler, I find it hardly necessary to include
them in the list of means of modern decoration, and indeed it is not necessary,
since a well-preserved tapestry of a good period, and of a famous manufacturer
or origin, is so costly a purchase that only our bounteous and self-indulgent
millionaires would venture to acquire one solely for purposes of wall
decoration. It would be purchased as a specimen of art and not as furnishing.
Yet I know one instance of a library where a genuine old foliage tapestry has
been cut and fitted to the walls and between bookcases and doors, where the wood
of the room is in mahogany, and a great chimney-piece of Caen stone of
Richardson's designing fills nearly one side of the room. Of course the tapestry
is unapproachable in effect in this particular place and with its surroundings.
It has the richness and softness of velvet, and the red of the mahogany doors
and furniture finds exactly its foil in the blue greens and soft browns of the
web, while the polished floor and velvety antique rugs bring all the richness of
the walls down to one's feet and to the hearth with its glow of fire. But this
particular room hardly makes an example for general following. It is really a
house of state, a house without children, one in which public life predominates.
There is a very flagrant far-away imitation of tapestry which is so far from
being good that it is a wonder it has had even a moderate success, imitation
which does not even attempt the decorative effect of the genuine, but
substitutes upon an admirably woven cotton or woollen canvas, figure panels,
copied from modern French masters, and suggestive of nothing but bad art. Yet
these panels are sometimes used (and in fact are produced for the purpose of
being used) precisely as a genuine tapestry would be, although the very fact of
pretence in them, brings a feeling of untruth, quite at variance with the
principles of all good art. The objection to pictures transferred to tapestries
holds good, even when the tapestries are genuine.
The great cartoons of Raphael, still to be seen in the Kensington Museum,
which were drawn and coloured for Flemish weavers to copy, show a perfect
adaptation to the medium of weaving, while the paintings in the Vatican by the
same great master are entirely inappropriate to textile reproduction.
A picture cannot be transposed to different substance and purpose without
losing the qualities which make it valuable. The double effort to be both a
tapestry and a picture is futile, and brings into disrepute a simple art of
imitation which might become respectable if its capabilities were rightly used.
No one familiar with collections of tapestries can fail to recognise the
largeness and simplicity of treatment peculiar to tapestry subjects as
contrasted with the elaboration of pictures.
If we grant that in this modern world of hurry, imitation of tapestries is
legitimate, the important question is, what are the best subjects, and what is
the best use for such imitations?
The best use is undoubtedly that of wall-covering; and that was, indeed, the
earliest object for which they were created. They were woven to cover great
empty spaces of unsightly masonry; and they are still infinitely useful and
beautiful in grand apartments whose barren spaces are too large for modern
pictures, and which need the disguise of a suggestion of scenery or pictorial
subject.
If tapestries must be painted, let them by all means follow the style of the
ancient verdure or foliage tapestries, and be used for the same purpose—to cover
an otherwise blank wall. This is legitimate, and even beautiful, but it is
painting, and should be frankly acknowledged to be such, and no attempt made to
have them masquerade as genuine and costly weavings. It is simply and always
painting, although in the style and spirit of early tapestries. Productions of
this sort, where real skill in textile painting is used, are quite worthy of
admiration and respect.
I remember seeing, in the Swedish exhibit of women's work in the Woman's
Building at the Columbian Exposition, a screen which had evidently been copied
from an old bit of verdure tapestry. At the base were broad-leaved water-plants,
each leaf carefully copied in blocks and patches of colour, with even the effect
of the little empty space—where one thread passes to the back in weaving, to
make room for one of another colour brought forward—imitated by a dot of black
to simulate the tiny shadow-filled pen-point of a hole.
Now whether this was art or not I leave to French critics to decide, but it
was at least admirable imitation; and any one able to cover the wall spaces
between bookcases in a library with such imitation would find them as richly set
as if it were veritable tapestry.
This is a very different thing from a painted tapestry, perhaps enlarged from
a photograph or engraving of a painting the original of which the
tapestry-painter had never even seen—the destiny of which unfortunate copy,
changed in size, colour, and all the qualities which gave value to the original,
is probably to be hung as a picture in the centre of a space of wall-paper
totally antagonistic in colour.
When I see these things I long to curb the ambition of the unfortunate
tapestry-painter until a course of study has taught him or her the proper use of
a really useful process; for whether the object is to produce a decoration or a
simulated tapestry, it is not attained by these methods.
The ordinary process of painting in dyes upon a wool or linen fabric woven in
tapestry method, and fixing the colour with heat, enables the painter—if a true
tapestry subject is chosen and tapestry effects carefully studied—to produce
really effective and good things, and this opens a much larger field to the
woman decorator than the ordinary unstudied shams which have thrown what might
become in time a large and useful art-industry into neglect and disrepute.
I have seen the walls of a library hung with Siberian linen, stained in
landscape design in the old blues and greens which give tapestry its decorative
value, and found it a delightful wall-covering. Indeed we may lay it down as a
principle in decoration that while we may use and adapt any decorative effect
we must not attempt to make it pass for the thing which suggested the effect.
Coarse and carefully woven linens, used as I have indicated, are really far
better than old tapestries for modern houses, because the design can be adapted
to the specific purpose and the texture itself can be easily cleaned and is more
appropriate to the close walls and less airy rooms of this century.
For costly wall-decoration, leather is another of the substances which have
had a past of pomp and magnificence, and carries with it, in addition to beauty,
a suggestion of the art of a race. Spanish leather, with its stamping and
gilding, is quite as costly a wall covering as antique or modern tapestry, and
far more indestructible. Perhaps it is needlessly durable as a mere vehicle for
decoration. At all events Japanese artists and artisans seem to be of this
opinion, and have transferred the same kind of decoration to heavy paper, where
for some occult reason—although strongly simulating leather—it seems not only
not objectionable, but even meritorious. This is because it simply transfers an
artistic method from a costly substance, to another which is less so, and the
fact may even have some weight that paper is a product of human manufacture,
instead of human appropriation of animal life, for surely sentiment has its
influence in decoration as in other arts.
Wood panelling is also a form of interior treatment which has come to us by
inheritance from the past as well as by right of natural possession. It has a
richness and sober dignity of effect which commends it in large or small
interiors, in halls, libraries, and dining-rooms, whether they are public or
private; devoted to grand functions, or to the constantly recurring uses of
domesticity. Wood is so beautiful a substance in itself, and lends itself to so
many processes of ornamentation, that hardly too much can be said of its
appropriateness for interior decoration. From the two extremes of plain pine
panellings cut into squares or parallelograms by machinery, and covered with
paint in tints to match door and window casings, to the most elaborate carvings
which back the Cathedral stalls or seats of ecclesiastical dignity, it is always
beautiful and generally appropriate in use and effect, and that can hardly be
said of any other substance. There are wainscotted rooms in old houses in
Newport, where, under the accumulated paint of one or two centuries, great
panels of old Spanish mahogany can still be found, not much the worse for their
long eclipse. Such rooms, in the original brilliancy of colour and polish, with
their parallel shadings of mahogany-red reflecting back the firelight from tiled
chimney-places and scattering the play of dancing flame, must have had a beauty
of colour hard to match in this day of sober oak and painted wainscottings.
PAINTED CANVAS FRIEZE
BUCKRAM
FRIEZE FOR DINING-ROOM
One of the lessons gained by experience in treatment of house interiors, is
that plain, flat tints give apparent size to small rooms, and that a satisfying
effect in large ones can be gained by variation of tint or surface; also, that
in a bedroom or other small room apparent size will be gained by using a wall
covering which is light rather than dark. Some difference of tone there must be
in large plain surfaces which lie within the level of the eye; or the monotony
of a room becomes fatiguing. A plain, painted wall may, it is true, be broken by
pictures, or cabinets, or bits of china; anything in short which will throw
parts of it into shadow, and illumine other parts with gilded reflections; but
even then there will be long, plain spaces above the picture or cabinet line,
where blank monotony of tone will be fatal to the general effect of the room.
It is in this upper space, upon a plain painted wall, that a broad line of
flat decoration should occur, but on a wall hung with paper or cloth, it is by
no means necessary.
Damasked cloths, where the design is shown by the direction of woven threads,
are particularly effective and satisfactory as wall-coverings. The soft surface
is luxurious to the imagination, and the play of light and shadow upon the warp
and woof interests the eye, although there is no actual change of colour.
Too much stress can hardly be laid upon the variation of tone in
wall-surfaces, since the four walls stand for the atmosphere of a room. Tone
means quality of colour. It may be light or dark, or of any tint, or variations
of tint, but the quality of it must be soft and charitable, instead of harsh and
uncompromising.
Almost the best of modern inventions for inexpensive wall-coverings are found
in what are called the ingrain papers. These have a variable surface, without
reflections, and make not only a soft and impalpable colour effect, but, on
account of their want of reflection, are good backgrounds for pictures.
In these papers the colour is produced by a mixture in the mass of paper pulp
of atoms of varying tint, which are combined in the substance and make one
general tint resulting from the mixture of several. In canvases and textiles,
which are a more expensive method of producing almost the same mixed effect, the
minute points of brilliance of threads in light and darkness of threads in
shadow, combine to produce softness of tone, impossible to pigment because it
has but one plain surface, unrelieved by breaking up into light and shadow.
Variation, produced by minute differences, which affect each other and which
the eye blends into a general tone, produce quality. It is at the same time soft
and brilliant, and is really a popular adaptation of the philosophy of
impressionist painters, whose small dabs of pure colour placed in close
juxtaposition and fused into one tone by the eye, give the purity and vibration
of colour which distinguishes work of that school.
Some skilful painters can stipple one tone upon another so as to produce the
same brilliant softness of effect, and when this can be done, oil-colour upon
plaster is the best of all treatment for bedrooms since it fulfils all the
sanitary and other conditions so necessary in sleeping-rooms. The same effect
may be produced if the walls are of rough instead of smooth plaster, so that the
small inequalities of surface give light and shadow as in textiles; upon such
surfaces a pleasant tint in flat colour is always good. Painted burlaps and
certain Japanese papers prepared with what may be called a textile or canvas
surface give the same effect, and indeed quality of tint and tone is far more
easily obtained in wall-coverings or applied materials than in paint, because in
most wall-coverings there are variations of tint produced in the very substance
of the material.
This matter of variation without contrast in wall-surface, is one of the most
important in house decoration, and has led to the increased use of textiles in
houses where artistic effects have been carefully studied and are considered of
importance.
Of course wall-paper must continue to be the chief means of wall-covering, on
account of its cheapness, and because it is the readiest means of sheathing a
plaster surface; and a continuous demand for papers of good and nearly uniform
colour, and the sort of inconspicuous design which fits them for modest
interiors will have the effect of increasing the manufacture of desirable and
artistic things.
In the meantime one should carefully avoid the violently coloured papers
which are made only to sell; materials which catch the eye of the inexperienced
and tempt them into the buying of things which are productive of lasting unrest.
It is in the nature of positive masses and strongly contrasting colours to
produce this effect.
If one is unfortunate enough to occupy a room of which the walls are covered
with one of these glaring designs, and circumstances prevent a radical change,
the simplest expedient is to cover the whole surface with a kalsomine or
chalk-wash, of some agreeable tint. This will dry in an hour or two and present
a nearly uniform surface, in which the printed design of the paper, if it
appears at all, will be a mere suggestion. Papers where the design is carried in
colour only a few shades darker than the background, are also safe, and—if the
design is a good one—often very desirable for halls and dining-rooms. In
skillfully printed papers of the sort the design often has the effect of a mere
shadow-play of form.
Of course in the infinite varieties of use and the numberless variations of
personal taste, there are, and should be, innumerable differences in application
of both colour and materials to interiors. There are differences in the use of
rooms which may make a sense of perfect seclusion desirable, as, for instance,
in libraries, or rooms used exclusively for evening gatherings of the family. In
such semi-private rooms the treatment should give a sense of close family life
rather than space, while in drawing-rooms it should be exactly the reverse, and
this effect is easily secured by competent use of colour.
