"WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUR WALLS?"

The design of the frieze should not be too prominent nor formal: some of the best that I have seen have been of a paper not expressly intended for such a use, covered well over with flowers not too large. The object of the frieze is to make a colored band or, rather, a tinted band under the cornice, and to simply modify the height of the wall. This latter purpose would be defeated rather than assisted by a formal pattern with large and brilliant figures, for such a frieze would pull the ceiling, figuratively speaking, over our ears, and beside would kill the effect of the main portion of the wall. But, here as everywhere, we have to consider things in their relations, and some of the New York parlors, especially those in the old-fashioned houses, are so large and empty-looking, even when furnished, that we have to give the walls heroic doses of ornament in order to keep them down.

A use to which wall-paper is seldom (in my experience) put in New York, is the covering of ceilings; and yet it is often so employed in Boston, in the houses built and decorated by the younger architects there, and employed too with excellent effect. White ceilings are, or ought to be, disagreeable to everybody, and yet in the want of decorative talent among our house-painters already complained of - as for the professional fresco-painters, their work is always irredeemably bad - wall-paper is the only substitute that is within the means of most people. Of course, if artists like Messrs. Louis C. Tiffany and Samuel Colman will undertake the commission, there is no more to be said. We are not now thinking of exceptions however, but of the general rule. And certainly for the most of us, covering the ceiling with well-chosen wall-papers arranged in a large central field with a good border, is an expedient to be commended. The whole should be kept flat, however - at least, in nine cases out of ten, it should be so - but in the tenth case there is sure to come along a decorative genius who will do the wrong thing and make us think it the right thing. But we are not to reckon on miracles. We have to take the work-a-day world as we find it, and our ceilings must be covered as we can best contrive it with the help of our own taste and the resources of the paper-dealers' shelves. It ought to be difficult to go astray in the matter, considering how plentiful is the supply of papers suitable for all purposes - pretty and elegant, rich and fanciful, sober and retiring - designs on which all the skill of the time we live in has been expended to make them satisfactory to the most exacting taste.

The important step has been taken by the house for which this tract is written. Messrs. Warren, Fuller & Co., of employing American artists to make them designs for wall-papers of their own manufacture. Messrs. Louis C. Tiffany and Samuel Colman, two artists whose work has enjoyed a great deal of popular favor, and whose experience and surrounding have made them acquainted with the elegancies and refinements of our modern life, and familiarized them with all the best designs of the East as well as of Europe, have accepted the commission, and for some time have been engaged in studies and experiments, the results of which are shown, in part, in certain of the illustrations bound up with these pages. It seems to me that this is beginning in the right way. Owing to the practical difficulties in the matter, the difficulties that an artist whose sole business has been to paint pictures on squares of canvas, must find in taking up design as an art, it was not to be expected that even artists working with the advantages enjoyed by Messrs. Tiffany and Colman would find their way altogether smooth. It was necessary to try a great many experiments before they could feel satisfied to submit anything to the public, and the papers they have designed and which Messrs. Warren, Fuller & Co. have manufactured, are certainly well worth the attention of all persons interested in the growth of the arts of design in this country. We wish those intelligent and public-spirited citizens who, beside the liking they have for art itself, feel also a generous concern for the part America is to play in its development, and who are trying to bring about a time when we shall not go abroad for arts that can as well be produced at home - we wish these fellow-citizens of ours would see the truth, for it is a truth - that the way to encourage the healthy, normal growth of any form of art, the true and only way to teach it is to set it at some actual work intended to be paid for, and to be worth paying for. I never did have any faith in art-schools, whether supported by the money of a nation or by that of individuals, and if the matter is well looked into, it will be found that progress in any art has always come from the experience gained in carrying out regular business-commissions, or in supplying actual needs of men and women.

It was in this matter-of-fact utilitarian way that the arts of painting and sculpture came to be born, and it was in doing such useful, needed work that they grew and developed their magnificent strength in Italy; and when the time came for the birth of the more avowedly useful arts, the art of pottery, for example, these grew up and flourished without any other aid whatever than the universal law of supply-and-demand gave them. Even the princes patronized the potteries because they wanted the things the potter made, and not from any sentimental feeling of patriotism. They saw it was better every way to have the things that had hitherto been imported, made at home by their own people, so that their own treasuries could be filled by the profits of trade. There never was talk heard of the necessity for schools-of-design in any country where art really flourished. There was, no doubt, a capacity for what we call art-production, a capacity that is found much more in some people than in others, but it was never developed anywhere where it did exist, nor created anywhere where it did not exist, by means of schools, but only by actual experience in serious work.

Therefore it is, that, the undertaking of the Messrs. Warren, Fuller & Co., is beginning at the right end. They have invited artists to design them wall-papers that shall have decided artistic qualities, and yet shall be suited to actual needs, and that shall command a place in the market. They want to make a breach in the wall of old ideas and fashions of the past, that hedges us in, and to create something that shall have a unborrowed, individual look.

"But," says one, "What is the use? Why try to compete with French wall-papers, the best and most beautiful in the world, and suited to every taste." Who, then, I ask, set the French going, and were there not French folks who threw cold water on French enterprise at the start? No, I doubt if there were, for the French have always had the good common-sense to be true to themselves, to encourage home genius, home talent, and home manufacture; and French gothic architecture, French painting and sculpture, French gardening, French tapestry, porcelain, faiance, silks, fashion - each has led the race in its turn, because there was nobody to disparage it, and no one to listen to disparagement had it been offered. There must be a beginning in the improvement of the decorative arts as in everything, and, for my part, I should be glad to see it come here as in everything, and, for my part, I should be glad to see it come here as it came in England and France in the days before art-schools were invented, to the deadening of all art-instinct, and the extinction of all originality. In another field, the Messrs. Warren, Fuller & Co. are doing the same service for the decorative arts here in America, that the Wedgewoods did in England, and if the artists will only second these gentlemen with their best aid, they can afford to wait for the public, knowing that they must buy their wall-papers if they are handsome, and that they will buy them in case they take their fancy, without asking whether they came from France or not.

It may be interesting to remember that the very wall-papers of the Queen Anne and early George's time, which are now coming into fashion again, were designed by nobody in particular, and at a time when there were no art-schools anywhere; and one can easily see that the wall-papers, the stuff-patterns, and the furniture of that time, all of which things are the rage now and are turning the heads of our fashionable seekers for novelty, go together, showing that they came out of the same creative mould and were the product of a sort of spirit-of-the-age. Now, why cannot we pursue the same course pursued by the people of that time, refusing to copy anybody, and trusting to artistic ideas and feeling to carry the day? Were we to do so, we should, like enough, in the end, have France as willing to learn of us as, in these days, she is willing to learn of that England whom once she so much despised.

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