Decorator

“ In so far as the principles of decoration are derived from other arts, they can be acquired by every one, but an exquisite feeling in their application is the distinguishing quality of the true decorator. ”

“ This is the true mission of the decorator, although it is not always so understood. What is called business talent may lead him to invent schemes of costliness which relate far more to his own profit than to the wishes or character of the house-owner. ”

“ When the nation is called on to do honor to one high in the world’s esteem, and State, corporation or society coffers contribute to the erection of a triumphal arch, the experienced decorator, supplementing his knowledge with the advice of the carpenter, plasterer and painter, will submit plans and specifications, and will frequently secure the contract. Figure 50 shows a quadruple arch placed at the intersection of two streets. ”

“ Ideographic, non-ideographic, and purely pictorial characters are combined in the most heterogeneous manner in the decoration of a single vessel. The decorator has ceased to work under the guidance of his instincts as a rule unerring, and now, like the mass of his more highly civilized brethren, he must grope in darkness until culture shall come to his aid with canons of taste—the product of intellect. ”

“ Time, and our proximity to other cancelled symbols is no guarantee of interior understanding. The Great Decorator has arranged us without regard for our individual merits or past intrinsic values, we are but points of colour in his immense and arbitrary arrangement. I was following up this thought, when the brass Canterbury Pilgrim that serves us for a knocker was vigorously sounded, and I sprang to open the door to Miss Fraenkel. ”

“ A professional decorator is a person of either sex who can think up more ways and quicker ways of spending other people's money than the director of a shipping board can. But whether you retained the services of a regular decorator or elected to struggle along on your own, you went for your purchases to specialty shops or to antique shops, or—best of all—to the smart auction shops on or hard by Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue. ”

“ Before 1800 the decorator called upon to treat the interior of a house invariably found a suitable background prepared for his work, while much in the way of detail was intrusted to the workmen, who were trained in certain traditions instead of being called upon to carry out in each new house the vagaries of a different designer. ”

“ The decorations and furnishings of a house depend largely on its style of architecture and the owner's taste. Further, if in any doubt, it is better to do too little than too much. Under such circumstances, too, an interior decorator is helpful ”

“ USES OF THE DECORATOR
If we have not done so before, when we take up consideration of the walls we will, if we can afford it, call in a professional decorator. First, of course, we will make sure that he really may be of service to us, for his duty is to give practical and artistic development to the more or less vague ideas of which we have become possessed, and if he seems, from examples of previous work, to be wedded to a "style" of his own that would not jibe with our aspirations, we would better try to struggle along without him. ”

“ For it is no use attempting to have a pretty house unless we are absolutely strong-minded, and begin by forbidding the decorator to do anything but what he is told to do; and it is much wiser to write down exactly at the commencement of our decorations ‘precept on precept,’ ‘line upon line,’ ‘word by word,’ for each room, exactly what we wish the room to be arranged like, putting on paper the name and number of the wall paper, the colour of the paint, and in fact every single thing, so that at the end there can be no mistake ”

“ Almost every article of furniture may thus be made, as it were, to speak and sympathize; for the return every decorated object makes to the decorator is always in direct proportion to the amount of life and thought he has put into his work. ”

“ The exact amount of significance still attached to significant figures after adoption into decoration cannot be determined except in cases of actual identification by living peoples, and even when the signification is known by the more learned individuals the decorator may be wholly without knowledge of it. ”

“ The lady decorator is pleasant to work with; she will use your own flowers if you like, so that one’s country-houses can send their quota, and one always enjoys the things from home. She is equally ready to fill your window-box or balcony, to furnish your dwelling-rooms [Pg 57] with flowers both cut and growing, to smarten up your concert-platforms or theatrical scenes, to dress your bazaar-stalls for you, to make your Court bouquets, or sprays for hair and dress; she will even help you to decorate your churches ”

“ Decorative motives derived from natural forms are abundant and afford an excellent opportunity to study the processes of conventional modification. These designs are often applied in a way to indicate that the decorator possessed a keen sense of the requirements of the vessel, although the treatment perhaps is not as universally satisfactory as is the treatment of plastic embellishment. ”

“ HE principles on which the restorations have been carried out will more fully appear, in the description we give in our subsequent pages, in regard to every detail of the work. Here we need only say that the most studied care has been taken never to renew any decoration where it was possible to preserve it—least of all ever to attempt to “improve” old work into new. On the contrary, repairing, patching, mending, piecing, cleaning, have been the main occupations of the decorators, to an extent that would render some impatient, slapdash builders and surveyors frantic. ”

“ It is said truly, that much of the beauty and vigour of mediæval works arises from the fact, that the actual decorators worked artistically, with a view to the excellence of their work, and not merely to the wages to be received for it. If this spirit is reviving, or has revived, in the present day, much is probably due to the work on the New Palace at Westminster, where there certainly was in a very high degree this feeling among those who took subordinate parts in the work. ”

“ In early Victorian days there was no lack of educated people, and because they liked the particular form of decoration associated with their period, who is justified in saying that, because that peculiar style of decoration is not acceptable now to ourselves, their art was bad, and worse than our own? If throughout the ages there had been one dominating style of decoration equally accepted at all periods and by all authorities as the highest type of decorative art, then we should have some standard to judge by. ”

“ It is, indeed, fortunate that the home can supply affection for things and persons not very presentable; but it is none the less true that the word has gradually come to represent the impression that beauty is for outside show, and that anything will do for home purposes.
Decoration (decus) means the bestowal of honor. Beauty followed honor. Because man honored his deity, grand temples and cathedrals arose and altars blazed with gems; and because he honored the prince and the noble, palaces were decked with splendor. ”

“ His prosperity has blossomed out into exquisitely ornate decoration. A band of carving runs along the front of the house, and from the curved stem of it branch out a hundred charming devices--leaves, tendrils, strange flowers, human heads, Tudor roses, a crowned king and queen lying hand in hand, a baby diving with a kick of fat legs into the bowl of an arum lily, and in the midst the merchant's mark upon a shield and the initials of the master of the house. ”

“ Decorations.
A tenet of Delsartean art asserts that, “A decoration is to make something else beautiful and must not assert, but sacrifice itself. Ornament that has no use whatever is never, in any high sense, beautiful.” ”

“ This decoration is presented to a lady who, having by her conduct and years earned successive decorations, has passed the last five years unexceptionally and uprightly in all things, and has, besides, shown intelligence of a high grade.
If, during the five years succeeding that in which she won the "Matterode," this lady remains unaltered in greatness and goodness, she is entitled, in addition, to a decoration of considerable value, in which the "Mountain Supporter"—which gives its name to the Order, is faithfully copied in the purest and most beautiful metals. ”

“ Entertaining this view on the subject of ornament, makes me the more anxious to take all possible pains in selecting the style of decoration, so as the house should prove that its owner is a lover of art, and that it should, as far as is compatible with a reasonable economy, be considered in some degree as a pattern of what might be accomplished in the matter of decoration. ”

“ Decoration.—I will first discuss the cases in which the males are ornamented either exclusively or in a much higher degree than the females, and in a succeeding chapter those in which both sexes are equally ornamented, and finally the rare cases in which the female is somewhat more brightly-coloured than the male. As with the artificial ornaments used by savage and civilised men, so with the natural ornaments of birds, the head is the chief seat of decoration. [61] The ornaments, as mentioned ”

“ In the decoration of a room the fireplace is naturally the central feature, to which in some cases the heraldry is confined; in others, and the larger number, it covers the panel above, the decoration varying in amount from a carving in the centre of the frieze of the chimney-piece, or on comparatively small centres of panelling, to the whole armorials fully displayed. Fig. 202 is an example of badges employed in this way, and is another of the many representations of the devices of Louis XII and his Queen, Anne of Brittany. ”

“ For there are many forms of so-called decoration in architecture, habitual, and received, therefore, with approval, or at all events without any venture at expression or dislike, which I have no hesitation in asserting to be not ornament at all, but to be ugly things, the expense of which ought in truth to be set down in the architect's contract, as "For Monstrification." ”

“ Noble architecture calls for noble decoration. Decoration is one of the natural instincts of man, and from the earliest records of his existence we find him striving to give expression to it, we see it in the scratched pieces of bone and stone of the cave dwellers, in the designs of savage tribes, and in Druidical and Celtic remains, and in the great ruins of Yucatan. ”

“ It is true we are free to draw inspiration from the same sources which supplied Morris and the men associated with him in his enthusiasms, and in fact we do lean, as they did, upon English eighteenth-century domestic art—and derive from the men who made that period famous many of our articles of faith; but there are almost no authoritative books upon the subject of appropriate modern decoration. ”

“ Every age, too, has its own notions of decoration—indeed one might say even every decade now, or even a less period, we live so fast! No rules or canons of taste in art are of universal application or acceptable to all periods. As decoration is primarily fitness and harmony, with this central idea one may produce decorative effects with very different materials, and we have only to glance back to our historic periods to see how it was accomplished. ”

“ There was about the interior decoration of Louis XVI, as about the lives of aristocratic society of that time, a "penetrating perfume of love and gallantry," to which all admirers of the beautiful must ever return for refreshment and standards of beauty and grace. ”

“ So they said, just like the Emperor, "Yes, it is very pretty," and they advised him to have some clothes made from this magnificent stuff, and to wear them for the first time at the great procession that was about to take place. "It is magnificent! beautiful! excellent!" they said one to another, and they were all so exceedingly pleased with it that the Emperor gave the two rogues a decoration to be worn in the button-hole, and the title "Imperial Weavers." ”

“ Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our national holidays. ”

“ The humble early efforts at decoration, called by the French “primitif,” are the first we know and class, and are found in all savage attempts at ornament. This style consists mainly of straight lines, zigzags, wavy lines, dots, and little discs. ”

“ Besides which, as life goes on, I am thankful to say that decoration becomes more and more a fine art.
Formerly people rather scorned the idea of being ‘house-proud’ in the same manner in which all are nowadays. ”

“ I suppose we all like, in a childish way, to wear placards of our prowess in the form of orders and decorations, but the evening attire of this bureaucratic nobility often looks as though there had been a ceramic eruption, a sort of measles of decorations. Men’s breasts are covered with medals, stars, porcelain plaques, and their necks are hung with ribbons with a dangling medallion, all distributed from the patriarchal imperial Christmas-tree for every conceivable service from cleaning the streets to preaching properly on the imperial yacht. ”

“ It is ordained with a view to place all persons on a perfectly equal footing in relation to eligibility for the decoration, that neither rank, nor long service, nor wounds, nor any other circumstance or condition whatsoever, save the merit of conspicuous bravery, shall be held to establish a sufficient claim to the honour. ”