DOI Heft:
No. 253 (May 1914)
DOI Artikel:Quigley, J.: The art of Jessie Bayes, painter and craftswoman
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21209#0277
Jessie Bayes, Painter and Craftswoman
ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT OF SHELLEY?S "NIGHT" WRITTEN AND ILLUMINATED BY JESSIE BAYES
( The property of J. G. White, Esq., New York)
only to meet the exigencies of her own needs, but most is trying to think how to bring it into some-
because of a growing conviction that art must be thing simpler. That is the dream that absorbs me.
more closely allied to life, and that the painting of At Nuremberg I was enthralled, in the Museum
pictures is not the great need of our day. In a Germanica, by various peasant interiors, wherein
recent letter to the writer Miss Bayes thus explains everything was decorated naturally and simply by
her own aims. Writing of a suggestion for a dining- the people. The result was enchantingly happy,
room, she speaks of a treatment " which might in For towns this peasant work would naturally be
some way uphold the beauty of that symbolic act of affected and out of place, and it is too rough to be
eating as the continuance of life. I do want in some done conscientiously by artists trained in fineness
sort of way to wed the physical and spiritual and discrimination, but the spirit is true, and
and glorify the one by its meaning viewed from something should be possible on those lines that
the other standpoint. Just now I seem absorbed should express the temperament and ideals of the
in bedrooms—as I told you, I am now embark- people who inhabit the rooms. I feel a decorator's
ing on one for Vienna and one, much simpler, first duty is to get to understand the disposition of
in London. I would wish to be known far his client, and, seizing the most beautiful trait
more by my manuscripts and decorations and thereof, transform and glorify it into his surround-
furniture than pictures—because I feel that is ings. . . . Always I go on dreaming that some
what art is wanted for just now, and though day my work may be nearer to what I strive and
at present my work is costly, what interests me long for—and that is something to live for."
270
ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT OF SHELLEY?S "NIGHT" WRITTEN AND ILLUMINATED BY JESSIE BAYES
( The property of J. G. White, Esq., New York)
only to meet the exigencies of her own needs, but most is trying to think how to bring it into some-
because of a growing conviction that art must be thing simpler. That is the dream that absorbs me.
more closely allied to life, and that the painting of At Nuremberg I was enthralled, in the Museum
pictures is not the great need of our day. In a Germanica, by various peasant interiors, wherein
recent letter to the writer Miss Bayes thus explains everything was decorated naturally and simply by
her own aims. Writing of a suggestion for a dining- the people. The result was enchantingly happy,
room, she speaks of a treatment " which might in For towns this peasant work would naturally be
some way uphold the beauty of that symbolic act of affected and out of place, and it is too rough to be
eating as the continuance of life. I do want in some done conscientiously by artists trained in fineness
sort of way to wed the physical and spiritual and discrimination, but the spirit is true, and
and glorify the one by its meaning viewed from something should be possible on those lines that
the other standpoint. Just now I seem absorbed should express the temperament and ideals of the
in bedrooms—as I told you, I am now embark- people who inhabit the rooms. I feel a decorator's
ing on one for Vienna and one, much simpler, first duty is to get to understand the disposition of
in London. I would wish to be known far his client, and, seizing the most beautiful trait
more by my manuscripts and decorations and thereof, transform and glorify it into his surround-
furniture than pictures—because I feel that is ings. . . . Always I go on dreaming that some
what art is wanted for just now, and though day my work may be nearer to what I strive and
at present my work is costly, what interests me long for—and that is something to live for."
270