[Illustration: "Athens." Mural Painting in the Walker Art Gallery at Bowdoin College.]
That this power over color is the life and soul of the decorator need hardly be urged. Decoration which is applied to a flat surface and which is not in relief, except, perhaps, to a slight extent and occasionally, has for its main object, its main _desideratum_, richness or refinement of coloring, or both. If one has a wall to decorate, the first idea of the true decorator is to invest it with splendor or with delicate strength of color. He seeks for fresco, or the encaustic process, or mosaic, or, as in modern times, oil-painting upon a strained canvas, indifferently and according to the spirit of his time and the practice of his contemporaries; but his object is one and the same--to invest his wall or ceiling with noble color. Little may he care what the subject of the painting or mosaic may be. According to the requirements of the epoch or community in which he lives, it may be a procession of saints or a dance of bacchanals; the primary object which he has in view is to procure a most enjoyable and delightful piece of color--and other things are of secondary importance. Glass, then, would seem to be especially prepared for La Farge's work, and La Farge especially prepared for glass. Consider the memorial window which fills a window-opening in a church at North Easton, Mass., a town which owes much to the lady whose memory is thus honored. Upon a background of broken and changing blue are relieved the three figures larger than life-size which nearly fill the opening. Two of these figures are clothed, one in drapery of the most vivid green, the other in drapery of orange-brown; that is to say, these are the general colors offered to the eye of the spectator by the infinite number of minor tints, all passing into one another in subtle gradation, which make up the general mass of drapery. It is to be observed, then, that these figures are also seen to be clothed in rags, and that the idea, the notion of wretchedness and tatters is maintained in spite of the sumptuous clothing of glowing color which invests it all. That is an instance as good as can be found of what the colorist has to do in this world. He does not ask whether beggars have ever been dressed in such garments as have been described, but he has to express the two-fold image, Beggary and splendid color, and out of these he makes up his work of art, as unlike as may be to anything in nature, but none the worse for that. To return to mural painting; there is one merit which all La Farge's brother-painters agree in awarding to him, and that is the power of putting a painting upon the wall so that it does not change the character of the wall as a part of the building. His painting takes nothing away from the solidity of the wall which it invests. The upright mass retains its rigidity and weight, it still carries the roof, it still holds firmly to the adjoining walls, it is a massive and trustworthy part of the construction, and the painted picture has added to rather than taken from its permanent and resting quality. How this is done is fully as inexplicable as is the glow and splendor of color itself. No one can say abstractly and without having the picture immediately before him how any such result is attained, nor is it easy to explain the picture, even to the looker-on, in any such terms as will fully express this quality. It is one of the most valuable qualities which mural painting can possess--mural painting which fluctuates between the flatness which is also feebleness and a kind of realism which carries with it the effect of out-of-doors--of a hole in the wall. The same thing obtains in his minor work, and here the background, the temple, or rock, forty feet away, is as perfectly detached from the foreground figures as would be a distant and airy mountain miles away, while still the picture remains flat cardboard or flat canvass invested with light and shade and color.