Halsey has ferreted out. It occurs in Edward Johnson's "Wonder-Working Providence of Sion's Saviour in New England" of 1642. "Further the Lord hath been pleased," he says, "to turn all the wigwams, 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 seventeenth century at Topsfield, Mass. It is an affair of the baldest simplicity but that simplicity is not rude; it is seemly and

into the Hampton room, in which the walls are covered with the original New Hampshire panelling, you note an extraordinary progress in taste. Primitive as it is in epoch this room nevertheless shows in its investiture, especially in a corner cupboard and in the panelled ceiling, a strong desire to overlay luxury upon comfort. The evolution goes on into the eighteenth century through the room from Portsmouth, Rhode Island, on this floor, and is continued through the remaining chambers on the lower floors until we reach a high pitch of sophistication. In all these developments, which I make

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 cabinet, and when we lacked it our carpenters 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 protectors. They exchanged the products of their skill and labour for the money of the rich, and received kindness and hospitality "in the bargain." Our first visiters were probably all from Great

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

The interesting thing to get at here is the question of the Colonial point of view, whether it was consciously artistic or whether it regarded art as wholly related to that instinct for comfort and luxury to which I have alluded. Did that liking for what the English liked, and that disposition to cultivate the same style, flower in a definite appreciation of art as art? Mr. Halsey quoted in the "Bulletin" last summer an advertisement published by John Smibert, who was a dealer as well as a painter in Boston, which

points to the existence of the amateur. It runs:

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

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

&c. Most of the Prints very rare and not to be met with except in private collections; being what Mr. Smibert collected in the above mentioned countries, for his own private use and improvement.

Mr. Halsey tells me, too, that buyers of

prints in the old days were more than lavish, sometimes fairly spotting a wall with engravings. The American Wing happily refrains from reproducing this foible. Both its paintings and its prints are restrained in number. Its testimony is, notwithstanding, in confirmation of the significance of Smibert's advertisement. It is clear that the Forefathers

tioned primarily as a record, not as a source of sensuous pleasure.

APROPOS of the sensuous note it is

suggestive to observe the matter of color in the early American social fabric. I have glanced at the modest gleam of decoration in red and black over the mantelpiece in the reproduction of the Hart parlor. The rudimentary color-sense there manifested was bound to develop. It crops out more bravely in imported textiles, in hangings of painted cotton and in velvet cushions. On the rush or wooden

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 modern eye and I can imagine the pleasure it gave to the Colonial housewife, how it brought something jocund into an otherwise 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 glistening dark mahogany. That is a misinterpretation. 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 contrary, 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 reason to doubt it-we may be sure that he stayed a farmer unillumined by any of the subtleties of art.

I DONT think they were very subtle

folk, these ancestors of ours. I don't think there was anything recondite about their æsthetic outlook at all. Indeed, it is an open question as to whether the word "æsthetic" had any great status in their vocabulary. As I have indicated, I do not see them as collectors in the strict sense, even though they had their occasional collections of prints and ceramics. I see them, rather, just as people of good breeding and consequent good taste. Art as the American Wing puts it before us, art as it was brought over from England, and somewhat artlessly nurtured here, was wreaked upon nothing more nor less than social amenity. And in its very detachment from the milieu of the collector, the connoisseur, it kept itself free to strengthen the one quality which was to prove, æsthetically, our salvation. The seasoned collector

pays a certain penalty for his rôle. It makes him a complex being and makes his taste eclectic. We began with a strong tincture of fairly classical simplicity, and the outstanding lesson of the American Wing is that it stayed with us for full two hundred years. We wax in sophistica