Of Decorative Painting and Design.
seeks only to be an unbiassed recorder of all accents and sensational conditions or nature and life,—and so we get our illustrated newspapers on a grand scale.
An illustrated newspaper, however, in spite of the skill and enterprise it may absorb, is not somehow a joy for ever; and, after all, if literalism and instantaneous appearances are the only things worth striving for in painting, the photograph beats any painter at that.
If truth is the object of the modern painter of pictures—truth as distinct from or opposed to beauty—beauty is certainly the object of the decorative painter, but beauty not necessarily severed from truth. Without beauty, however, decoration has no reason for existence; indeed it can hardly be said to exist.
Next to beauty, the first essential of a decoration is that it shall be related to its environment, that it shall express or
