Arts and crafts essays / Morris, Wm C

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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: OF DECORATIVE PAINTING AND DESIGN HPHE term Decorative painting implies the existence of painting which is not decorative: a strange state of things for an art which primarily and pre-eminently appeals to the eye. If we look back to the times when the arts and crafts were in their most flourishing and vigorous condition, and dwelt together, like brethren, in unity?say to the fifteenth century?such a distinction did not exist. Painting only differed in its application, and in degree, not in kind. In the painting of a MS., ofOf Decora. the panels of a coffer, of a ceiling, a tivePaindng wali, Qr an altarp;ece, the painter and Design., was alike ? however different his theme and conception ? possessed with a paramount impulse to decorate, to make the space or surface he dealt with as lovely to the eye in design and colour as he had skill to do. The art of painting has, however, become considerably differentiated since those days. We are here in the nineteenth century encumbered with many distinctions in the art. There is obviously much painting which is not decorative, or ornamental in any sense, which has indeed quite other objects. It may be the presentment of the more superficial natural facts, phases, or accidents of light; the pictorial dramatising of life or past history; the pointing of a moral; or the embodiment of romance and poetic thought or symbol. Not but what it is quite possible for a painter Of Decora. to deal with such things and yet to tive Painting i 11 i 11 i i and Design. produce a work that shall be decorative. A picture, of course, may be a piece of decorative art of the most beautiful kind; but to begin with, if it is an easel picture, it is not necessarily related to anything but itself: its painter is not bound to consider any...