International studio (24.1904/1905(1905))

Blashfield's Mural Decorations


(Copyright, 1904, by E. H. Blashfield) (From Photograph by the W. D. Inslee Photo. Co., New York)
E. H. BLASHEIELD’S MURAL DECORATIONS IN THE MINNESOTA CAPITOL, AT ST. PAUL ,

many sumptuously dressed palaces in Europe
which shock the taste woefully. Are we, therefore,
to be negatively virtuous and reserved ?
Some tailors and some artists have good taste;
some of ours, here in the United States, fortunately.
Beautiful mural decorations are becoming increas-
ingly in demand and many of our most skilled
artists produce little in these days but wall paint-
ings—some in bathrooms, some in senate cham-
bers. Each is honorable in accordance with its
artistic qualities, as an ancient bronze stewpan dug
from the ruins of a Roman house excites our ad-
miration as much as a royal chariot. Edwin How-
land Blashfield’s recently mounted lunettes, in the
Senate Chamber of the Capitol of Minnesota, at
St. Paul, are beyond a doubt his finest works,
though I can recall modest panels, made years ago,
which excited my admiration distinctly; nor should
I regret to see him decorating a kitchen, so surely
would it be a glorified temple of the not-to-be-de-
spised sister-art of the cook!
The subject treatment of these lunettes is allegori-
cal, and the arrangement is formal, not to say archi-
tectural. Each person reads into an allegory—if
the title be lost sight of—his own temperament.
Some one suggested that the two peasants in
Millet’s Angelus were not praying, but mourning
over the rotten potatoes. But no one will ever say
foolish things in the presence of these panels. They
are too beautiful to provoke frivolity, too majestic
to admit of vulgar associations, too entirely a part
of the studied architecture of the imposing Senate
Chamber to be less than respected and too rich and

harmonious in colour to allow any one to wish for the
restoration of the virgin wall. I have seen decora-
tions by distinguished artists, of which this cannot
be said. Good mural painters are not plentiful.
It is very easy to regret the virgin wall at the stair-
case in Berlin, where (the supposedly great) Kaul-
bach has ruined the surface and our tempers, by
spreading glaring colours which represent colossal
giants, of a romantic unhealthiness or grotesque
unreality, as you like to pronounce them. Even the
superb painter, Jean Paul Laurens, has “spoiled
the wall” of the Hotel de Ville, in Paris, with won-
derfully drawn and superbly brushed figures, which
would be magnificent in any other conditions—any-
where but as murals in architectural setting.
An architect of unearthly genius might dare to
build an arch of one side regular and the other
eccentric; but Cass Gilbert did not do so in the
Senate Chamber in St. Paul. Therefore Blashfield
has followed the same sentiment of dignity and well-
regulated propriety in the arrangement of his figures
and lines, and he has done this with consummate
ingenuity and complete knowledge of his problem,
as well as very pure artistic sentiment. His studied
allegories are simple and easily comprehended, and
will never be misunderstood, because of the simple
legend (on one of them) Haec est Minnesota Gra-
naria Mnndi, the abundance of the food supply in
this world’s granary indicated by the figure seated
on the harvest car drawn by milk-white oxen,
creatures as superb in their kind as the glorious
woman who suggests harvest sovereignty. This
panel is lively in colour, in contrast to the gravity of

LXXXVIII