International studio (58.1916)

Interior Decoration and Personality

job themselves. Families there are, either with-
out any opinions, or else bristling with conflicting
opinions, or again, ruled by a sort of bell-wether
artistic daughter or aunt. There are the prac-
tical and the visionary, the original and the imi-
tative, those who are faddish and those who are
so conservative and backward in anything that
approaches spontaneity of expression that they
invariably buy the usual, even though fundamen-
tally ill-considered, thing. It is to these latter
intelligent and well-meaning individuals that the
dapper salesman declares truthfully: “This is
one of those staple goods we shall always carry
(if you don’t take them off our hands!).”
But perhaps one of the most remarkable facts,
in respect of our particular subject, discernible
to the watchful decorator, is that the elemental
responsiveness of individuals never changes much.
Aesthetic perception, though primarily through
the senses, is secondarily always a matter either
of intellect or of mere emotive sensation. People
appear to be born inalterable upon earthly or
spiritual planes of varying degree. With one
person maturity in aesthetic development means
merely a more acute perception of literal, obvious,
material values; with another, it means a more
delicate sensitivity to spiritual values.
For example, there was a certain simple, severe
rendering of Late Empire that was no less pagan
than the Roman, only it was an etherealized
Roman—the sublimation of the Roman shorn of
its earthly literalities. So with the Italian Renais-
sance. An ethereal person sees in its decorative
pomp, its material richness, a certain earthly
limitation, an opaque literalness, out of all which
he is not content until, through physical renun-
ciations, he re-embodies its inward qualities.
So every style has its higher degrees of inter-
pretative appeal, from the plane of the senses to
that of the intellect.
The question often arises regarding individual
interpretation. A house or an apartment being
the abode of a number of persons, how shall it
express or interpret one personality?
Well, in the first place, let me say that a re-
sponsive decorator usually finds—and it is most
indicative of a selective excellence of lineal strain
—an aesthetic unity in families underlying, per-
haps, quite a diversity of personal characteristics.
This is often noticeable in the types of objects a
family accumulate. The careful decorator will
sense and develope this unity into one component

personality. But where such possibility is down-
right lacking and the reverse condition emphatic-
ally obtains, this very diversity itself may be
treated with artistic effect as a working unit,
interpreting a collective individuality. How
often, on the other hand, do we see persons
among surroundings that but reflect some pro-
fessional hand—a tediously unimaginative, im-
personal, academically wrought effect of “chiseled
correctness” which its occupants will never vital-
ize nor possess in the sense of a living and sym-
pathetically responsive background.
In the second place, however, I should frankly
explain that the particular kind of personality I
am treating of naturally more often does find its
most apt and effective usage in what might be
termed the aesthetic efficiency of an individual
rather than of a group. Its happiest applications
perhaps are to definite types of persons, those
having native capacities for distinctive personal
atmosphere—for the more forceful or exquisite
individual radiations, gleams or auras, as they
are sometimes termed, and who, quite decidedly,
though gracefully, dominate their surroundings.
Now modern interior decoration in its best
practice, that aims at personal interpretation,
rather than mere impersonal assemblings taken
piecemeal from past examples, seeks out that
which is native in a person and most worthy,
aesthetically, of finding organic extension, as it
were, and externalizes it in a corresponding spirit
of indoor surroundings.
A dozen years ago to have written of the native
gleams or the aura that characterizes every indi-
vidual would have been received with something
of that half-serious and indulgent attitude so
prevalent during the latter part of the Second
Empire when the cultured social world amused
itself with all preternatural, occult and psychic
whisperings. Now it has become a ruling part
of practical efficiency to study the psychological
relations and reactions of surroundings. Many
there are, I regret to say, both of architects and
decorators, who are prone to account the more
subtle phenomena of decorative interpretation,
such as auras or radiations, in clients as imprac-
tical or visionary when these pass beyond the
range of their imagination or sensitivity. They
are like the socialist who declared that the line
of inequalities of wealth and leisure should be
drawn at “those unworthies who play golf.” The
socialist had but one arm.

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