Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 140, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 June 1919 — ORIENTAL LOVE OF BEAUTY [ARTICLE]

ORIENTAL LOVE OF BEAUTY

Flower* and Nature Have Always Figured Prominently In Their Paintings and Writings. The Orient was always fond of flowers. In primitive times the Arabs studied the big herbals of Byzantine doctors and scientists and copied flower after flower in their own manner; they loved them, but they were unconscious, of their beauty. When they wanted to adorn they only used the conventionalized form of the lotus and the arabesque flower consecrated by hundreds of years of tradition. Later on Chinese masters taught them the living beauty of flowers. In the Mongo) miniatures they study the blossoming almond tree and the Iris, but in the sixteenth century only they begin to love the flower for itself — to study each leaf, each petal, each line and each line of color. They show tlie same Intimate love for detail which inspired the landscapes of Behzad. Their landscapes are always like the poems of Hafiz —sunny, cheerful arid gay. Nothing more charming than these meetings of kings and princesses in tlie greens under richly embroidered tents with musicians and •lancers. And no difference If tlje artist paints one of the cruel bloody scenes of the antique “Shahnameh”; must It net he a wonderful feeling to bq executed by the order of the king in his illustrious presence, with rata'ners and maidens around, tlie sun shining, a soft wind covering your bead and shoulders with the pink petals of tlie almond tree in flower? The birds sfng sweeter than over in the trees. The touch of tlie cold steel is it f ter all only of passing moment and eternal is the beauty of sun. spring rind flowers. —R. M. Rlefstahl, in Asia Magazine.