Studio: international art (10.1897)

Mural Decoration in Scotland

DECORATIVE PANEL ILLUSTRATING THE

STORY OF "ORPHEUS.". BY JOHN DUNCAN

menced, and the brush and the chisel worked in-
separably together till the Renaissance. Then the
brush sued for divorce. It wanted more scope,
more independence than the old union allowed of.
The high relief, the linear perspective indispensable
to its ambitious realism, architecture would none of.
And so the rift grew, until it became a gulf which,
with the best will in the world, our artists to-day
can hardly cross. The easel picture, originally just
a portable bit of coloured wall, as it were, has so
utterly lost any organic connection with building,
that its only possible part in the architectural

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scheme corresponds to the view through a window,
so that easel methods must be largely unlearnt, and
other laws than those which concern painting alone
must be sympathetically deferred to, if mural art is
to live again among us.

Everybody knows what Puvis de Chavannes has
done in France, and how adequately he has caught
up and continued the best tradition. His frescoes
in the Pantheon are not only beautiful in them-
selves and sympathetically just to the architectural
plan ; they are drawn to scale with the architect's
conception, and impress with the same vastness as
the building that contains them. Sir Frederic

DECORATIVE PANEL ILLUSTRATING THE

STORY OF "'ORPHEUS." liY JOHN DUNCAN