Pictures — by the painter Koris

Pictures have become, in our present day, an essential and important part of the design of every room. Pictures are the mirror of the artistic progress of their owners and collectors. Economic reasons may force the mistress of the house to keep some hideous, ugly piece of furniture in a room, but there is no excuse whatever for an ugly picture that the family does not love to remain hanging on the wall. A bare wall is far better than pictures poor in art and beauty.

The choice of artistic pictures is a science and a matter of experience. What matters in selecting them is attention to their colors, their lines, their form, their subject, and their manner of execution. Pictures

A part of the reception room in the house of Mr. Joseph Bridi: pictures have been used here in a beautiful and inventive way, combining small pictures with large ones.

are hung in the house either for their colors and lines, or for the pleasure and beauty they create in our souls, or for the splendor and richness they add to the room, or for the thoughts and images they suggest to our imagination — not because they are the right size, or a gift from a friend.

When we see the same pictures hung in many houses, or pictures of the same class — oil paintings only, representing similar subjects — we wonder at it and ask: can it be that people are ignorant of the many kinds of pictures, their different subjects, and their varied manners of execution? The kinds of pictures are many: among them the oil, the watercolor, the black-and-white, the reproduction, and so on; as for their subjects and the ways of painting them, they are numerous and we cannot count them here. The important thing is to know that they exist, so that the same paintings are not repeated in every house. The pictures possessing the utmost vitality are those painted in this age of ours. The famous artistic paintings executed in past ages have become known to a degree at which they have lost much of their power to rouse and stir the human imagination, and this has made them unsuitable for decorating the home. But the use of reproductions of the less-known among these paintings may suit and serve that function.

Pictures speak of their owner. The mistress of the

Here the two pictures compose a beautiful group with the piece of furniture.