Morris Exhibit At The Foreign Fair
Boston, 1883-84

As regards the manufacture, we may say that great attention has been given to the permanence of the colors, more especially against light and soap; but we must caution you that some of the colors may not safely be sent to the ordinary wash. These can be pointed out by the salesman. There are none, however, that may not be cleaned with perfect safety and success. The cloth is a full yard in width, and is invariably finished without dressing or glaze. The curtains in this room exhibit four different kinds of printing. The Strawberry-thief is a many-colored pattern on plain cotton, colored by repeated processes both delicate and tedious, and all the colors being dyed, they are very fast. The red Brother-rabbit is also a color produced by dyeing. It represents the cheapest and best of our single prints. Next it is a many-colored pattern on linen, the Honeysuckle, a peculiarly beautiful pattern, quite without parallel in the history of block-printing on cloth. It represents a group of varieties, some on linen, others on cotton, for which there is not room in the stall. The colors of this pattern are printed directly on the linen. As one of them is indigo-blue, this may be worth noting. The fourth curtain is a sample of block-printing on cotton-velvet. These four are exhibited as curtains, but they are not all intended to be restricted to that use. The Honeysuckle makes a wonderfully beautiful wall-hanging, and being printed on a somewhat lustrous and better material than cotton, it bears hanging without folds. It may be stretched on the wall exactly as silk. A room dressed with it should have the wood-work of very richly tones walnut or mahogany; or, if meaner wood be used, it should be painted a rich, deep green, and varnished. The Strawberry-thief would also make a very lovely wall-covering for a small room.

Some apology is perhaps necessary in America for presenting such a homely article as cotton for a decorative material. There is, in the first place, the prejudice attaching to a material. There is, in the first place, the prejudice attaching to a material usually selling for a few cents the yard, and covered with pattern at that; and there is the reputation for vulgarity with ordinary cotton-prints have acquired. We have ventured, notwithstanding, to offer our cotton-prints under no other name. they are simply cotton-prints, whether the material be the ordinary plain cloth, twilled cloth, or the heavier fabric called cretonne. We consider the material in every way suitable for ordinary house-furnishing. it is eternally washable; it is unmolested by moth; and it is the least costly of all the materials at our command. Disregarding, then, the discredit which the continued competition of manufacturers for success in the cheapest market has obtained for cotton-prints; we have been engaged for some years in publishing a series of designs fuller and richer than this manufacture has heretofore see, - if we except the elaborate work of Javanses and Indian artists, never available, however, for the same purposes; and while aiming to present these patterns in tones available for decorative uses, we have sought first of all for durability in the colors employed. In doing this, we had to neglect all the processes employed in the production of cheap prints. instead of the steam-cylinder, we use the primitive wood-block; and we dye our fastest colors with material long since discarded from the dye-shops of Alsace and Lancashire, because of the cost. we do this from no antiquarian sentiment, but because there is no other way to produce permanent effects in colors an artist may use. this explanation will account to some extent for what may seem high prices, as compared with the ordinary cost of cotton-prints, and Americans will do us the justice to remember that the initial cost is aggravated here by an almost prohibitory tariff.

In the remaining rooms are shown wall-papers, curtain-damasks, embroideries, and the two most conspicuous features of our exhibit. We will describe first the

WALL-PAPERS

as they are nearly connected with the wall-hangings we have been describing; and in speaking of them, something further may be said on the subject of wall-decoration.

In the Decorative Arts, nothing is finally successful which does not satisfy the mind as well as the eye. A pattern may have beautiful parts and be good in certain relations; but, unless it be suitable for the purpose assigned, it will not be a decoration. Unfitness is so far a want of naturalness; and with that defect, ornamentation can never satisfy the craving which is a part of nature. What we call decoration is in many cases but a device or way we have learned for making necessary things reasonable as well as pleasant to us. The pattern becomes a part of the thing we make, its exponent, or mode of expressing itself to us; and by it we often form our opinions, not only of the shape, but of the strength and uses of the thing. Now, since man became a wall-builder, three things have appeared necessary things have appeared necessary to him in the outward fashioning of every wall he has built - a base, or foot; the screen, or wall proper; and the cornice, or coping. the base must be big enough to give a sufficient footing for the super-structure; apparently, of course, - the real footings being deep in the ground. The cornice, inside a building is for uniting the wall with the roof or ceiling. In a room the places of wall and ceiling, by their different relations to the light, have quite different tints, though actually they may be of precisely the same color - white for instance. If the ceiling be dark the wall will be light, and `vice versa.' Now the artifice for uniting these opposing tints and planes is to fill the angle between them with a series of narrow fillets and alternating curved surfaces, by which the tints of wall and ceiling are interchanged and the transition is made. The cornice is completed by drawing a line somewhere below the moulded part, usually about as much below it as the depth of the moulding itself. This cuts off the cornice sharply and distinctly from the wall proper. Sometimes a piece of wall, just below the cornice, is cut off from the rest for greater dignity, or because the wall otherwise would look too high; this is not an essential, but it is often of great architectural value. Sometimes, in very refined work, the base of the wall is itself a wall of stouter and more solid appearance; it has then its own proper parts - base, superstructure, and cornice. This is the dado.

Only when a wall is very high, or the scale requires much detail, will dado, wall, and frieze, be all used. In our living-rooms, dado, wall, and cornice are generally sufficient; or, if there is no dado, only the skirting or merest base of the wall, a frieze may be worked in some way so as to diminish the apparent height of the room. There is no rule to fix the proportion absolutely; good sense and feeling must always decide; but the three essentials must in some way be exhibited. Then as to the social relations of the parts, the base, if skirting only, should be treated with great simplicity, - either with suitable timber, or plainly painted, dark or light as the case may require, but without picking out of mouldings or other fidget. if a dado be part of the structure of the wall, it will probably have moulded panels and chair-rail; these will be quite sufficient decoration of its surface, and the painting will be as described for the skirting alone. If the dado be not panelled, do not make sham panelling; paint it of one color, which must be that of the architraves of windows and doors. Never stoop to the ignominy of a paper dado; at a fancy fair, or some temporary thing, where effect without solidity may be excused, mere scene-painting is allowable, - but scarcely at home. It must always be borne in mind that the essentials of a dado are those of the wall, base, superstructure, and cornice. The chair-rail is the representative of the cornice and cannot be omitted. If the wall obviously wants a dado, the effect may be at once got by fixing a rail of suitable section at the required height, and painting from rail to floor with one color.

The cornice in our living-rooms is of somewhat uncertain relations; properly it belongs to the wall, of which it is the capping, or the broadened butt which gives support to the floors above it; but since our floors are concealed, and the plaster coverings are so unreasonably treated as to suggest, not a series of beams or arches resting on the wall, but one huge sheet of plaster suspended miraculously overhead, - the cornice becomes by necessity the moulded edge of the ceiling, which, with this for a frame, gets that look of substance and strength so very desirable in the slab of plaster of that size. In ordinary cases, therefore, the cornice is part of the ceiling, and the two should be so decorated as to look all one. The readiest and often the best way of doing this is to distemper them both with one even clear tint, the lightest the tone of the room will permit. In England we find pure chalk-whitening, without mixture of blue or black (the usual correctives of its yellowness), is the best general tint; sometimes a little raw-sienna may be added to make it warmer, - or green, to cool it and deepen it; but for most occasions positively no addition is the best. not that the painting of ceilings should be discouraged; but the purposeless array of varied tints, the drawing of meaningless lines of color, would be better discontinued. When a ceiling is patterned, the cornice of course shares in the decoration; and it is then possible to assimilate the tints with the color of the ceiling, so far as to preserve homogeneity, and without losing the proper relation of the cornice to the wall. When a ceiling is well and properly moulded, - panelled, that is, or coffered, - it may be treated with more independence, and the cornice will then remain a true part of the wall.