Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 106, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 May 1914 — KEEP EFFECT IN MIND [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

KEEP EFFECT IN MIND

WALL DECORATION IS WORTHY OF MUCH THOUGHT. On the Proper Selection and Hanging of Pictures Depends Much of the Beauty of the Room—How Best to Display Them. ■ Very few people know how to hang pictures. This may seem a sweeping statement, but one has only to notice the different walls round about—perhaps in one's own home —and the sweep will be verified. In some rooms in which I have been I could be almost sure the pictures had been hung by the participants in a donkey party, each picture being tacked at random by a sightless one, .and by no means near the donkey!— here, there, everywhere, with no reference whatever to form, color, design, ornamentation, unity, but rather a proposition of so many pictures, so many bare walls, so many tacks, and up they go, with the result looking much so.

Now, while in most cases a plea could be made for more regularity, too much regularity (the wrong kind) is just as bad, writes Ethel Davis Seal in the Philadelphia North American. I remember once noticing the peculiar effect produced by a large picture and a small one exactly beneath it, repeated seven or eight times in one room, with no hope of a change in sight to relieve the mondtony. It was as trying on the nerves as a constant striking on one key on the piano. Besides, it cast reflection on the originality of the picture hanger. Even worse is thd overworked diagonal placing of pictures. WhHe this is occasionally good the occasion is only the exception which proves the rule, and I might almost ?ay that you should never put one picture a little to one side beneath another picture. And this seems the favorite placing on the walls of most amateurs. If you “know that you don’t know,” do not be afraid to hang just one picture of fair size in whatever space you have under consideration and condense all the little pictures you feel you must have on one wall. This brings me to one of the serious faults to be found sometimes with the pictures themselves: they are too small and insignificant. This can, in some cases, be overcome by condensing them. With this idea In mind, glance at the arrangement of the pictures over the drawing of a davenport. Immediately one receives a pleasant Impression caused by the harmony of design. The

six or more email pictures are grouped formally enough to form one unit, and one is not annoyed by a spotty hit-or-miss effect, which a more careless disposition of these same pictures would surely give. The space above the davenport might be correctly filled in other ways. The three lower pictures might be dispensed with, in which case the three larger ones should be lowered. Or one large picture could fill this whole space. In gathering a number of pictures into a group some attention should be given to the subjects, and ridiculous combinations avoided. They need not all be landscapes, and they need

not VU be- figures, but in spirit they should not be incongruous. You will see exactly what 1 mean when I tell you that I once saw the picture of a little boy whom nobody loves and who Is disconsolately considering going out in the garden to eat worms hanging directly under Hoffman’s head of Christ ♦