File:American homes and gardens (1912) (17534995043).jpg

Title: American homes and gardens
Identifier: americanhomesgar91912newy (find matches)
Year: 1905 (1900s)
Authors:
Subjects: Architecture, Domestic; Landscape gardening
Publisher: New York : Munn and Co
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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July, 1912 AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 235
Text Appearing After Image:
A carefully made replica of an Eighteenth Century Bavarian bride's dower-chest, painted in colors Painted Furniture By Abbott McClure and Harold Donaldson Eberlein Photographs by T. C. Turner 77^733; ... .., I. fcZr -—— O you ever think of furniture as having per- sonality? Whether you do or not, it has personality and has it to a marked degree. After all, personality is only an outward manifestation of character, in the case of furniture at any rate, and if furniture has not character we haven't a jot of reason for preferring one sort to another. Of course, if a chair is simply a chair, a table a table and a chest a chest, if we suffer from such a Peter Bell-like lack of all aesthetic sensibility, we may deny personality to furniture; otherwise we must concede it. Our tables and chairs, our sideboards and cabinets, all our house- hold goods in fact, are refined or vulgar in feeling; they are patricians in mien or simple peasants as the case may be, but they all have distinctive personality and one of the chief factors in conferring that personality is the element of color and its manner of application. Color and life are insepa- rable. From our cradles up we are surrounded by it. We cannot escape from it if we would, and few of us would wish to if we could. From the lowest depths of savagery to the height of artistic refinement, from north to south and from east to west, from the remotest past to the present moment, color and color combination have always been of paramount concern, and the way we deal with them determines whether or not we possess that much coveted and oft disputed qual- ity—good taste. We may choose to surround ourselves - i , — with a Whistlerian atmos- phere of drab and sepia or we may be like the eccen-

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