International studio (48.1913)

THE STUDIO

Anotable decorative
ARTIST: GEORGE SHER1NG-
HAM.
There are not many people at the present time
who would be prepared to question the signifi-
cance or to deny the importance of decorative art.
The value of the decorator’s work is too well
understood to-day to be subjected to that careless
disparagement under which it suffered not many
years ago, and the position of the decorative artist
in the art world is too clearly defined to be, as
it was until quite recently, a matter for debate.
Decoration has rightly come to be regarded as the
most vital of the various essentials which in com-
bination make the perfect work of art; it is recog-
nised as the indispensable foundation upon which
all the subsequent pictorial details must rest and
the starting-point for the scheme of design which it
is the artist’s intention to work out.

Of course, the decoration which plays so im-
portant a part in artistic practice is not the
mechanical and unintelligent mannerism which
unthinking people have been accustomed to ac-
cept as a permissible form of design. It is not,
that is to say, a mere convention—a dull per-
version of nature, or a stupid evasion of those
subtleties of invention which are evidences of
the artist’s intellectual capacity. The popular
idea of decoration in the past was something that
required little knowledge of nature and little care
in observation, something easy to do and therefore
of negligible value : and from this idea came, as a
not unnatural consequence, the belief that the
decorator’s position was an inferior one and his
work of trivial interest.
This idea has happily been changed for a
better understanding of the difference between
the mechanical perversion of decorative principles
and the application of these principles to work of


“THE PANTOMIME PANEL” PAINTED ON SILK BY GEORGE SHERINGHAM
(In the possession of Lady Sackville)
XLVIII. No. 189. —November 1912

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