Show window

“ The special efforts of the most successful window trimmers are directed toward the carrying out of the small details, without which there can be no perfect specimen of the window trimmer’s art, and for lack of which so many windows present a crude and unfinished appearance.
15 WHAT TO DISPLAY. The mission of the show window is not to display unsaleable goods, but to sell goods. If you can’t make a pretty picture and sell goods at the same time let the picture go, but make a display that will sell the goods. ”

“ About three feet from the back of your window put a screen of illusion or some open material, the color being cream or some light tint that will render the netting as invisible as possible. In the space behind the netting place some wires at various distances, so that the birds may perch upon them. A few canaries in this backing, flying here and there, as they will, will prove a great attraction. A painted background of a summer scene will greatly improve the effect.
Human Forms.—The fad just now is to 150use human forms to show goods. ”

“ The paper may be obtained from any first-class stationer, and when viewed from the sidewalk closely resembles real onyx.
PALM STANDS. When showing small articles in a window effective accessories may be employed by using draped stands of irregular heights scattered about the window, upon each of 44which is placed a palm plant. If the stands are draped in red or yellow they show off the green palms to good advantage. Smilax may be twined about the bases.
GLASS SHELVES. Have strips of single or double thick window glass cut to the size you desire. ”

“ Fault, no doubt, has been found with the windows that they do not throw down the light sufficiently from above, but the windows themselves are traceried and filled with beautiful stained glass. Upon entering by the great portal at the west, the eye is caught in the far distance by the glimmering colours of the grand east window, whose dimensions are colossal, as may be gathered from the fact that its traceried compartments comprise no fewer than 350 pictures in glass, copies, in many instances, of known paintings. ”

“ The fashion of the day builds plate-glass windows round them, but it is truly a gross superfluity.” The room in which Lady Cressage and the luncheon-table awaited them was of a more hospitable aspect. A broad expanse of lawn, and of distant trees and sky-line fading away in the sunny autumn haze, made a luminous picture of the high embrasured window stretching almost from corner to corner across one side. By contrast with the other apartments, the light here was brilliant. ”

“ What goes by the name of a window is half of it stuffed with rags or covered by boards to keep out wind and rain; the rest is so begrimed and obscured that scarcely can light enter or anything be seen outside. Should you have ascended to the attic, where at least some approach to fresh air might be expected to enter from open or broken window, you look out upon the roofs and ledges of lower tenements, and discover that the sickly air which finds its way into the room has to pass over the putrefying carcases of dead cats or birds, or viler abominations still. ”

“ A curious filmy vapor begins to float in the air, which slowly cohered, evolved vague phantasms; they unite, and gradually assume a definite shape. The headless woman fronts us at the window, she vanishes, and an immense sheet is waved twice or thrice from the right side of the window, something is flung out; we walk quickly up the garden and there, under the window, lies one of the books. ”

“ My fancy in connexion with you will picture always a rose-bowered window set in a grey stone wall—just a frame for you, with your moonlit hair and eyes like beautiful stars. Always I shall see you like that—inaccessible, while I stand below and gaze upward. ”

“ This window also had a shade, the shade was lowered, and on it the unseen lamp perfectly outlined the form of a third person. Without a mutter or the slightest gesture of passion, the man under the window raised the thing in his grasp as high as his shoulder, lowered it again and glanced around. He seemed to tremble. The man at his back did not move; his gaze, too, was now fastened, with liveliest manifestations of interest, on the window-shade and the moving image that darkened it. ”

“ The windows are enormous. Not satisfied with the giant sliding doors that open on the street, revealing windows—unencumbered with sash or glass, there are sliding doors under the window sills, that roll back right and left and offer the chance to introduce a current of air directly on the lower limbs. ”

“ But the sigh was followed by a smile.
“Let me pull down the blinds at this window,” she said pleasantly. “The sun is moving around, and if I open the other window you ’ll have a current of fresh air. That will be a great improvement.” ”

“ Such windows are obviously windows. The huge sheets of plate glass that people are so proud of are all very well for shops, but they are seldom right in small houses.
I remember seeing one plate glass window that was well worth while. It was in the mountain studio of an artist and it was fully eight by ten feet—one unbroken sheet of glass which framed a marvelous vista of mountain and valley. It goes without saying that such a window requires no curtain other than one that is to be drawn at night. ”

“ The modern window, with its huge panes of glass and simple framework, makes an insistent demand for curtains. Without curtains windows of this kind give a blank, staring appearance to the room and also a sense of insecurity in having so many holes in the walls. The beautiful windows of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Italy, England and France, give no such feeling of incompleteness, for their well-carved frames, and over-windows, and their small panes of glass, were important parts of the decorative scheme. ”

“ It was her custom to keep both her windows uncurtained at night, so that, waking, she might exchange a look with his stars, and sleeping, let them look at her. One window was always wide open. Like a flower, she craved for all the light and air that heaven and earth could give. ”

“ WHAT MISS EDITH SAW FROM HER WINDOW Our window's not much, though it fronts on the street; There's a fly in the pane that gets nothin' to eat; But it's curious how people think it's a treat For ME to look out of the window! Why, when company comes, and they're all speaking low, With their chairs drawn together, then some one says, "Oh! Edith dear!—that's a good child—now run, love, and go And amuse yourself there at the window!" Or Bob—that's my brother—comes in with his chum, And they whisper and chuckle, the same words will come. ”

“ The rose window over the portal as the symbol of silence teaches that nothing worldly has a voice there. The gigantic peaked windows send through their beautifully painted glass a richly coloured light full on the vast area. ”

“ THE WINDOW. Our first consideration is the background. White is too harsh for general work, but is good when the window is so dark that it makes much glare and reflection. In this case it will heighten the light, render the display more distinct, and assist in avoiding reflections. Black (flat or gloss) painting of the interior, or a black cloth background, is objectionable because it makes the window a veritable “camera obscura” and reflects everything. It also renders the colors of the goods dull or broken. ”

“ No degree of familiarity with old glass quite prepares one for the kind of thing which has made the humdrum market town of Gouda famous. Imagine a big, bare, empty church with some thirty or more huge windows, mostly of six lights, seldom less than five-and-twenty feet in height, all filled with great glass pictures, some of them filling the whole window, and designed to suggest that you see the scene through the window arch. ”

“ The subjects on each side of the window are very large in scale, very pictorially and very freely treated, very finely designed at times, and very splendid in effect; but they are most unequal, and they are all more or less of a tangle. Their confusion is the greater inasmuch as there is no attempt to balance one picture with another. A landscape background on one side of the window answers to an architectural background on the other. On one side the interest of the subject is towards the top of the lights, on the other to the bottom, and so on. ”

“ In the parlour window of this little habitation, which is so close upon the footway that the passenger who takes the wall brushes the dim glass with his coat sleeve—much to its improvement, for it is very dirty—in this parlour window in the days of its occupation by Sampson Brass, there hung, all awry and slack, and discoloured by the sun, a curtain of faded green, so threadbare from long service as by no means to intercept the view of the little dark room, but rather to afford a favourable medium through which to observe it accurately. ”

“ Bows of bright ribbon fastened to the chains midway between the pole and ceiling add to the charm of the display.
Illusion.—A very pretty window trim may be made by stretching illusion, of the quality that hats are lined with, across the center of the window, and upon its surface pinning fancy handkerchiefs, etc., in artistic, flower shaped effects. If the illusion is stretched tightly it will be almost invisible, and the goods will seem to the observer to be suspended in mid-air. ”

“ Most of the windows are only used to admit light except one that is used to look out of and is inhabited by an old lady who sits all day and knits for her grandchildren. It must not be so bad, I think, to look out of the window upon life instead of always rushing off to catch a car that takes one into the thick of it. ”

“ It makes a window attractive enough to stop pedestrians, who, glancing at the display, unconsciously note that the goods on exhibition are thrown prominently into the foreground, while the coloring that made them pause has modestly retired, and serves only as a foil for the articles of merchandise. ”

“ A sketch is, if it be any good at all, always worth a page of description, and so we will let the accompanying illustration take the place of mere verbiage. Only let it be observed that the larger gable and the window in it are new, having been rebuilt in 1880.
The great window, entirely constructed of oak, is the chief feature of the exterior, just as the noble room it lights is the principal object of interest in the house itself. ”

“ A very common practice is, to break a pane of glass near the window-fastening, which can be soon displaced by introducing the hand at the aperture thus made. Shop windows are frequently entered by the same means ”

“ At first the designer did not, as a rule, aspire to carry his subjects right across a big window. Accepting the transom as [Pg 198] a natural division, he would perhaps divide a four-light window vertically into two, so as to get four subjects, each under a canopy extending across two lights; or, in a five-light window, he would probably separate these by other narrow subjects in the central lights. ”

“ He must know them and humour them. Bars have to be accepted as needful supports, leads to be acknowledged as convenient joints; glass must be allowed its translucency, and painting kept to what it can best do. A window should own itself a window.
And what is the aim and use of a stained glass window? To “exclude the light,” said the poet, sarcastically. Yes, to subdue its garishness, soften its glare, tinge it with colour, animate it with form perhaps.
The man who means to do good work in windows will devote as serious study to old glass as a painter to the old masters. ”

“ The form of the windows is perhaps determined in part by the desire for more space for stained glass, but it is also the logical outcome of the space afforded by the level lines of a wooden roof just as the use of the pointed window follows from the use of pointed vaulting. ”

“ LECTOR. What rhodomontade and pedantry is this talk about the shape of a window?
AUCTOR. Little friend, how little you know! To a building windows are everything; they are what eyes are to a man. Out of windows a building takes its view; in windows the outlook of its human inhabitants is framed. If you were the lord of a very high tower overlooking a town, a plain, a river, and a distant hill (I doubt if you will ever have such luck!) ”

“ Here and there among the houses you sometimes see between two windows a painting simulating a third window half open, with perhaps a lady looking out into the street below, and this is so natural, that for the moment you fancy it is real. ”

“ I feel it necessary, however, while neglecting the more usual course of chronicling the history of window-tracery, to supplement my lectures at this point with some remarks on the general construction of windows—applicable more or less to all periods of Mediæval architecture.
The most normal form of a window in an arched style is simply an opening straight through the wall covered by a barrel arch. ”

“ When you looked out of the window there you saw a facade of other windows, with shaded lamps in them, and the shadows of people passing back and forth, and down below in the street more people, and taxis, and big, quiet, smooth-running private cars, and all the familiar city sounds. ”

“ There are a great many lovely big windows, all ready to let in the air and the sun, but they are as carefully covered with brown lace curtains under heavy stuff ones as though a whole row of houses were just opposite, with peering eyes at every window trying to look in, instead of there only being fields, and trees, and birds. ”