dignified. In the neighboring roo
producing the parlor of the Hart ho
is chamfered
Ipswich, the level of taste is slightly
The "summer beam
ing on thereby a little more interes
attaches to its prototype, and abo
fireplace there is a moulding on w
pattern of red and black hints at an
pected craving for color.

When y

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Seventeenth-Century Hall in the American Wing at The Metropolitan Museum.

Halsey has ferreted out. It occurs in Ed-
ward Johnson's "Wonder-Working Provi-
dence of Sion's Saviour in New England"
of 1642. "Further the Lord hath been
pleased," he says, "to turn all the wig-
wams, huts, and hovels the English dwelt
in at their first coming, into orderly,
fair, and well-built houses, well-furnished,
many of them." You may see the proof
of this in the American Wing, going first
into the room based on the kitchen of the
Capen house which was built in the seven-
teenth century at Topsfield, Mass. It is
the baldest simplicity but that

into the Hampton room, in whi
walls are covered with the origina
Hampshire panelling, you note an e
dinary progress in taste. Primi
it is in epoch this room nevertheless
in its investiture, especially in a
cupboard and in the panelled ce
strong desire to overlay luxury upo
fort. The evolution goes on in
eighteenth century through the
from Portsmouth, Rhode Island,
floor, and is continued through
maining chambers on the lower flo
til we reach a high pitch of sophisti
Tall these developments, which

Britain; and none staid long. The pilgrim
sought refuge from oppression and the
Their fc
ciently employed on the arts of necessity
pioneers of colonization, had their though
means of subsistence or defence.
brought wealth and pictures and importe
home the articles of luxury and the mater
art and artists followed; and as the effects
ornamental architecture. As wealth inc
freedom which the colonists enjoyed was

forcibly brings out our early dependence
in these matters upon the land from which
we sprang. We were English in blood
and in habit. We brought over the old
Jacobean and Elizabethan chest or cabi-
net, and when we lacked it our car-
penters and wood-carvers did their best
to copy the old designs and the old style.
I may cite here an apposite passage from
Dunlap:

The artists who visited the colonies found
friends and employers; they did not need pro-
tectors. They exchanged the products of their
skill and labour for the money of the rich, and re-
itality "in the bargain."

tive artists sprung up and excelled the from the father land."

The interesting thing to get at the question of the Colonial point of whether it was consciously artis whether it regarded art as wholly to that instinct for comfort and for what the English liked, and the to which I have alluded. Did that position to cultivate the same flower in a definite appreciation of art? Mr. Halsey quoted in the tin" last summer an advertisemen lished by John Smibert, who was a as well as a painter in Boston,

e pilgrims who and the other - thoughts suffiecessity and the Their followers imported from ne materials for alth increased, e effects of that ed was felt na

It runs:

points to the existence of the amateur. liked to embellish their walls. You may see that also in the several rooms in the wing which are adorned with Chinese painted paper or with pictorial papers printed in France. Still, the picture for its own sake was long in coming into its own. The portrait, painted or engraved, is the characteristic thing, and that func

To be sold at Mr. Smiberts in Queen Street on Monday the 26th instant. A Collection of valuable Prints, engraved by the best Hands after the finest Pictures in Italy, France, Holland, and England. Some by Raphael, Michael Angelo, Poussin, Rubens, and others the greatest masters, containing a great variety of Subjects as History

110

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A carved cupboard of about 1650.

seats of some of the old chairs in the
American Wing there are flung cushions of
ruby or emerald velvet. The color sets
off the furniture delectably to the mod-
ern eye and I can imagine the pleasure it
gave to the Colonial housewife, how it
brought something jocund into an other-
wise sober interior. But musing in these
rooms I have been greatly impressed by
their sobriety. We are apt to think of
the typical Colonial interior as an affair
of brilliant white contrasted with glisten-
ing dark mahogany. That is a misinter-
pretation. In the seventeenth century
panelling was left the natural color of the
wood, without oiling or polishing and
when it was painted it was more often
gray or blue or green. I don't think, by
the way, that their tints, then or later,
were particularly happy. On the con-
trary, some of those in the American
Wing are interesting only for their fidelity
to precedent. Intrinsically they are of a
deadly bleakness, some of the coldest, most
inartistic tints I ever saw. The panelling
in the room from Woodbury, Long Island,
for example, may have pleased the farmer
for whom it was made, but if the color he
saw was what we see-and there is no
to doubt it—we may be sure that
ed by any of

I

DONT think they were very s folk, these ancestors of ou don't think there was anythin ondite about their æsthetic o at all. Indeed, it is an open qu 66 æst as to whether the word had any great status in their ulary. As I have indicated, not see them as collectors in the sense, even though they had occasional collections of print ceramics. I see them, rather, people of good breeding and Art as the A quent good taste. can Wing puts it before us, ar was brought over from Englan somewhat artlessly nurtured her wreaked upon nothing more n than social amenity. And in it detachment from the milieu of t lector, the connoisseur, it kept free to strengthen the one which was to prove, æstheticall The seasoned salvation.

CO

pays a certain penalty for his rô makes him a complex being and ma taste eclectic. We began with a tincture of fairly classical simplicit the outstanding lesson of the Am Wing is that it stayed with us for f hundred years. We wax in soph

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A silver tankard made in New York by van Dyck, 1684-1750.