Mural

“ The mural painter is not only a painter, but a poet, historian, dramatist, philosopher. What should we know, how much should we realise, of the ancient world and its life without him, and his brother the architectural sculptor? How would ancient Egypt live without her wall paintings—or Rome, or Pompeii, or Mediæval Italy? ”

“ Those of our artists who are foolishly occupied in copying or transposing the beautiful art of the ancients have entered a blind alley which ends against a blank wall. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but in art it leads only to a fall.
Until very recent years, almost all important mural decorations were figure compositions in which landscape played only a minor part; but the trend of modern life points clearly to a time—a time in the very near future, I believe—when pure landscape will be largely used in mural work. ”

“ As a mural painting must always remain in its original position, it is peculiarly dependent upon its surroundings, and the mural painter has not only to consider the form and position of the space which the picture is to fill, but the color of the surrounding walls and the quantity and quality and direction of the light which it will receive. ”

“ Thus, in the most effective treatment in mural decoration, one sees only the grand forms, the movement, the intention, those things which most befit the inner surface of the building being also those which bear the greater importance. The fact is used as an argument for the assumption that painting should, after all, be an art of two dimensions, length and breadth, reserving thickness and its representation, for sculpture. ”

“ Being a little woman I enjoyed covering large spaces! And after my marriage to an artist-architect, mural work was the natural outcome of my husband's need of what I could do in carrying out details of his comprehensive designs for glass mosaics or mural painting, so that inspiration and opportunity came hand in hand. It was not easy. All mural work demands many preliminary sketches, studies from models, detail drawings and color sketches, and research work, as well as physical endurance, nerve force, and determination to carry through to the final large cartoon or painting. ”

“ Among the various excursions to the Exposition, I hope there will be one for old-school mural decorators—men who paint stiff central figures in brick-red robes, enthroned, and surrounded by cog-wheels, propellers, and bales of cotton, with the invariable male figures petrified at a forge upon one side, and the invariable inert mothers and children upon the other—I hope there will be an excursion to take such painters out and show them the brave swirl and sweep of line, the light, and the nacreous color which this artist has thrown into his decorations at the Fair. ”

“ You see, a mural painting is not like your illuminations. You can keep a book safe in a chest. But a painting on plaster—or on a wooden panel—is besieged day and night by dampness, and dryness, and dust, and smoke, changes of heat and cold,—everything. The wall may crack. The roof may take fire,—especially when pigeons and sparrows nest in the beams. The mere action of the air on any painting must be proved by years. ”

“ But to the artist they find their justification merely in being what they are, beautiful in outline and in posture and coloring. You don't often get such atmosphere in mural work, or such subtlety and richness of feeling."
Both murals unmistakably showed the same hand. "There's not another man in the country who could do work of just that kind. That group in the center of the mural to the north could be cut out and made into a picture just as it stands. It doesn't help much to know that the middle figure, with the upraised arm, is Inspiration with Commerce at her right and Truth at her left. ”

“ So mural painting differs materially from a picture painted on an easel. The easel picture has more detail, is placed in a frame when finished, and is destined to make a decorative spot on the walls. The modern mural painter now executes his design directly upon canvas in his studio, and when it is completed it is applied to the wall space by a composition of glue and white lead. ”

“ All this mural decoration was made in the spirit of the architecture, intended to complete the iconography of the great door and to amplify still further the cyclic character,—the general theme being the history of Christ and the glorification of the Virgin, with the accessory scenes that belong to it.
Let us cross the threshold: we are outside, before the façade. We must walk farther away in order to embrace all the lines and take in the masterly idea of the whole. It is most celebrated, that is well-known; for a long time, its richness has been a synonym of beauty in mediæval art. ”

“ But although the color-scale of a mural painting may be limited or attenuated, it must still remain true within its limits. Even the tapestry is true so far as it goes. The human eye would repudiate scarlet grass or a grass-green sky. The elements of the decoration must come from nature exactly as they do in the easel picture, the difference being that in the latter case the painter accepts and utilizes practically all that nature gives him, while the mural painter takes from nature only those elements which will best subserve his ends. ”

“ The best of mural decorations is books; they are more varied in colour and appearance than any wall-paper, they are more attractive in design, and they have the prime advantage of being separate personalities, so that if you sit alone in the room in the firelight, you are surrounded with intimate friends. The knowledge that they are there in plain view is both stimulating and refreshing. ”

“ A satisfactory definition of mural feeling would be difficult, since it is a quality composed of many elements, but I think most artists know what they mean by it. To my mind it includes a certain flatness of treatment with choice of simple planes, and pure and low-toned colours, together with a certain ornamental dignity or architectural feeling in the structure of forms and lines of composition, and is generally antithetic to accidental or superficial characteristics or what might be called landscape effects. ”

“ The principles of mural painting require that the composition shall be subordinated to the architectural conditions of the space it is to fill and that the color shall be kept flat. The fresco method meets these requirements admirably, but because of its flatness it has its limitations. ”

“ Now if the essentials of monumental painting, which we have named, and the special functions of the art of the painter are united in any scheme of mural decoration, the result would be an ideal work of decorative art, examples of which may be found in the frescos of Giotto, and in those of the majority of the Italian painters who followed him, down to the sublime creations of Michael Angelo. ”

“ The arrangement and composition of line, restfulness of the masses of form, and the harmonic balance and purity of colour are among the primary essentials of mural painting, and all these indispensable requisites of this form of art are due to its contact with architecture. While bearing this in mind, we must not forget that painting has its special functions apart from those of architecture, which include a controlling power over form and colour, and the faculty of illustrating ideas, by means{3} of the representation of a theme or an incident, a subject or a story. ”

“ Mural painting occupies a position alone and by itself, midway between the purely conventional decoration and the realistic easel picture. It must be sufficiently real to tell its story; it must not be so real as to destroy the flatness and solidity of the surface upon which it is painted. Mural painting, in fact, must be considered as an adjunct of architecture, and not as a self-dependent creation. ”

“ It is one of the most valuable qualities which mural painting can possess—mural painting which fluctuates between the flatness which is also feebleness and a kind of realism which carries with it the effect of out-of-doors—of a hole in the wall. The same thing obtains in his minor work, and here the background, the temple, or rock, forty feet away, is as perfectly detached from the foreground figures as would be a distant and airy mountain miles away, while still the picture remains flat cardboard or flat canvass invested with light and shade and color. ”

“ My long work of the summer was completed when I left the city, and the large mural design produced by it had been entered in the contest. It had taken me the bulk of the year to finish the painting, and when the last brush was cleaned I was no longer reluctant to yield to the claims of health and find rest and seclusion for a time. ”

“ In many cases these mural paintings are of high artistic merit, though they are probably not the work of the most distinguished painters of the time, but rather of a humbler class of decorators, who reproduced, without much original invention, stock designs out of some pattern-book. ”

“ They are delicate enough in pattern to go in the drawing-room and refined enough in manner to be seen and not heard.
Perhaps this very quality of refinement, so acceptable in his easel pictures, was something of a defect in his mural decorations. The greatly enlarged wall space of a public building called for more intensity of color, more sharp contrast of angle lines, more loftiness and elaborateness of composition than the painter [Pg 238] dreamt of in his art philosophy. His attempts at mural painting were somewhat sporadic. ”

“ The mural spaces available for fresco decoration having been gradually suppressed, and decorative painting limited to the illumination of certain subordinate members of the structure, the mediæval artists began to apply themselves to the decoration of the great screens of glass which, with their sculptured framework of stone, now filled the entire spaces between the piers. In this new art, or rather this incarnation of the spirit of decoration under a new form, we find a fresh illustration of that supple assimilative genius which already distinguished the French artist. ”

“ The story of mural painting in America dates back just a trifle over half a century; yet so rapidly do we develop things in this country that today the names of half a hundred men and women who have done distinguished work in this direction come to mind in any review of native accomplishment. However, the art of decoration is one of the oldest in the history of the world, examples of which have been handed down from almost prehistoric times. ”

“ I insist upon mural painting for three reasons—first, because it is an exercise of art which demands the absolute knowledge only to be obtained by honest study, the value of which no one can doubt, whatever branch of art the student might choose to follow afterwards ”

“ The hieratic tradition was set aside for the direct teaching and inspiration of nature. But as the mastery of the painter increased, the mural spaces available for the application of his new methods diminished rapidly, till, by the thirteenth century, the only wall surfaces left to him were those beneath the windows, and some few [181] triangular spaces in the vault, where the interlacing network of arches became gradually closer and closer. ”

“ Apart from a number of diagrams, viiithe illustrative material has been drawn from the masterpieces of American mural art. They symbolize what is best in our civilization; they may serve to give pupils a passing acquaintance with a few creative works of enduring value; and they have some artistic merit, which most textbook illustrations have not. ”

“ It only remains for me to point to the fact that mural painting, when it has been practised jointly by those who were at the same time easel-painters, has invariably raised those painters to far higher flights and instances of style than they seem capable of in the smaller path. ”

“ The very interesting mural paintings, for instance, which date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, have been slowly yet surely fading ever since the wooden panelling was removed forty years ago, and well-meant modern experiments, which were intended to preserve the colour, seem only to have added to their destruction. ”

“ The painted decorations on the walls of some of the rooms in these old-world dwellings have been preserved by the dry sand, and remain almost as fresh as they were on the day they left the hand of the artist, whose bones have long since been resolved into their native dust."
From the Encyclopædia Britannica I condense the long article on "Mural Decoration":
There is scarcely one of the numerous branches of decorative art which has not at some time or other been applied to the ornamentation of wall-surfaces. ”

“ As it is possible that the most industrious collector of mural literature may not have been fortunate enough to possess himself of this production, which ought by all means to be preserved amongst the materials of our provincial religious history, I subjoin a faithful copy. ”

“ The definite but abstract forms, the primary colours cleared by black outlines, and the resulting flat decorative effect of early Egyptian art, have set the abstract type for mural painting for all ages. ”

“ Its frame, which separates a picture from its surroundings, also helps to unite it again to its original home, where it becomes a movable instead of a fixed panel enclosed by a moulding. No word is perhaps oftener on the pen of the prattler about pictures (or art critic) than the word “decorative,” which seems very variously understood and applied to all sorts and conditions of painting. What is really comprehended by the phrase is appropriate treatment, or mural feeling. ”