Modern Mural Decoration. By A. Lys Baldry. (G. Newnes. 12s.
6d.)—Perhaps the most hopeful sign in modern English art is the attention now being paid to wall decoration. At present the movement is small, and much of the energy is misdirected. But no really permanent advance in art is likely to take place as long as the public demand and the artists produce nothing but easel pictures in gilt frames. There is no more despairing sight than to go to a great house and to see a Titian or a Raphael hung on the walls, while the room itself is decorated in the style of an Early Victorian hotel. The book before us gives a survey of the different methods of wall decoration,—painting, sculpture, plaster- work, gesso, and others. It is pleasant to find reproduced such beautiful things as the work done by Mr. F. L. Jenkins at Lloyds, while Mr. Brangwyn's art seems naturally to adapt itself to decoration. From the colour reproduction, we should judge Mr. Holiday's glass panel to be a most beautiful work, opening up a new range of effects. We are in entire agreement with Mr. Baldry when he criticises the work being carried out at the Exchange. These large panels are too often not decorations at all, but merely easel pictures fixed to the walls. It seems likely that here we shall have in London, as at the Pantheon in Paris, a first-rate example of how not to decorate a building. In Paris the work of Puvis de Chavannes stands out as the production of one who was a master of this form of art, and by comparison the rest of the paintings appear as awful warnings of what happens when the essentials are left out of account. By the essentials we mean the sympathy that should exist between the building decorated and the decoration.
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