Studio: international art (20.1900)

The Peninsular and Oriental Pavilion

THE DECORATIONS OF THE
PENINSULAR AND ORIENTAL
PAVILION AT THE PARIS
EXHIBITION.

It has been for some little time evident enough
that the only thing necessary for the development
of a really important school of decorative practice
in this country is a sufficiency of opportunities for
the men who have a true instinct for the higher
forms of design. There is no doubt that a large
proportion of our younger artists possess great
capacities for dealing with those problems of in-
vention and arrangement that lie outside the range
of purely pictorial effort, and that these capacities,
if properly encouraged, would be productive of
results that could fairly claim to be reckoned
among the most interesting and valuable that our
native art could achieve. But, hitherto, the
chances open to these willing workers have been
so limited that only a very few men have been able
to give more than a hint of their real strength.

However, the work that these few have already
done is certainly wanting neither in significance
nor in solid accomplishment. It has qualities that
are well calculated to appeal to all people of sound
intelligence, and to satisfy all lovers of originality
and freshness ; while in its technical excellence it
reflects the progress that all branches of the pro-
fession have made of late years in craftsmanship.
There is in it a note of the right kind of modern-
ness that respects tradition but does not merely
copy the productions of other ages and other
schools, a modern feeling that recognises the debt
due to the past but at the same time accepts the
obligations imposed by present day conditions of
thought and taste. Perhaps the dominance of this
feeling is to be ascribed to the fact that most of
the artists who are devoting themselves to decora-
tive effort belong to the younger generation and
have a characteristically youthful disinclination to
be bound too rigidly by the rules and regulations
that seem to them to have unduly limited the
freedom of the older men. The desire to break

PENINSULAR AND ORIENTAL PAVILION (RIVER FRONT)

T. E. COLLCUTT, ARCHITECT; G. E. MOIRA AND F. L. JENKINS, DECORATORS

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