Studio: international art (34.1905)

Frank Brangwyn's Exhibition Room at Venice

design a broad frieze, with great figure compositions,
without counteracting the effect of the pictures
shown below, requires the utmost consideration of a
master designer. All this he has done, and in the
doing of it has once more demonstrated his strong
convictions regarding " the fitness of things."

" In the arrangement of this room," he says, " I
have endeavoured to cause the person who enters
it to feel the presence of a quiet richness, a certain
sense of harmony, without being able for the
moment to give any reason for it."

In the embellishment of this spacious salon
Mr. Brangwyn has shown the wide range of his
versatility by designing everything pertaining to
the room himself. The furniture and hangings,
the woodwork and the mural panels, are all the
product of his creative genius.

To the visitor at the International Exhibition
this Brangwyn room will be a highly interesting
feature. The room is seventy-five by forty feet.
Four painted panels, herewith reproduced, form
the principal decorative feature. The two panels
for the side walls are eighteen feet in length by
five feet in height. The short panels at either end
are of the same height, the length being seven feet.

These canvases are framed by the interception
of the horizontal mouldings, with broad pilasters
at the ends. Continuing round the room is a frieze,
flush with the top of the panels, but half the width,
so as to allow greater wall-space for the pictures
shown below.

The use of this frieze of blue is as interesting as
it is original. It is unbroken, save for the short
pilasters, the small sten-
cilled pattern forming
merely an interesting spot
arrangement throughout
the field of blue. Its great
depth of colour gives a
suggestion of spaciousness,
as if one were looking
through open panels into
the vastness of a clear,
starlit night. Technically,
of course, the real purpose
of this band of colour is to
bring the whole room into
its unit of design.

Two feet above the floor
is a narrow shelf, sup-
ported by heavy blocks
serving as brackets. The
necessity of these several
parallel lines is obvious

when one thinks of the greater wall-space being so
broken by pictures of all sizes.

In the middle of the room is a pedestal corre-
sponding in character to the woodwork, especially
designed to support a very fine piece of bronze
statuary, the work of W. Goscombe John. This
pedestal will be surrounded by four bay trees, with
two benches at either end, the whole forming a
very compact rectangular group in fine propor-
tion to the floor space. The pedestal and all
other pieces of furniture have been admirably
executed by Mr. J. S. Henry.

" The scheme of colour," says Mr. Brangwyn,
" is what I believe to be the very best for the pur-
pose. The greater part of the walls are of a grey
buff, which, as a background for the pictures, will
neither take away from the subtleties of tone, nor
force into prominence any particularly strong notes
of colour occurring in the works shown."

The woodwork is of a warm golden-buff in fine
harmony with the walls and the blue and gold in
the frieze above.

Of the compositions, I need only touch upon
the colour scheme, for the strong decorative patterns
which one finds in all Brangwyn's paintings are
shown in the accompanying reproductions.

The scheme, to put it as simply as possible, pre-
dominates in the grey buff of the walls, but playing
on either side of this neutral is a fine juxtaposition
of rich golden-orange and deep violet-blue.

Regarding the subject-matter of these composi-
tions, Mr. Brangwyn has used that phase of the
life of Great Britain wherein we find him at his