Two great American painters, John Singer Sargent and Edwin Abbey, tried their hand also at mural painting, but the former was too much of a nature imitator, the latter too much of an illustrator to solve the problems satisfactorily. So with Albert Besnard of France.
Modern Decoration.—Modern conditions have prevented the traditional development of a true style in decoration.
All that such a decorator can hope to achieve in the circum stances is the creation of an aesthetic unity within such limits as the purpose of the building and the architectural setting of the space he is to cover with a painting will permit.
Fresco painting and its various methods, "in which carbonate of lime is formed and encloses the colours applied to the wet wall" (see Hamilton Jacks on Mural Painting), are laborious and unsuitable for damp climates. A more convenient medium is distemper or tempera painting, in which the colours are bound by egg, size or gum.
Yet another is the wax medium, not the old encaustic process, but one recently invented : it has the advantage of being as easily handled as oil colours and of producing a pleasing surface which is not so dull or "mat" as fresco nor so shiny as ordinary oil painting. There is, however, also a method of using oil as a vehicle without producing a shiny surface.
Whatever medium be employed, the principal thing is that the design should be conceived in the spirit of the architecture which the mural painting is to decorate, and by the term decorating is here meant not only an adornment envisaged but, for less am bitious schemes, a feeling of physical and mental comfort.
The next consideration is that the design as such should form a connected whole, so that the eye, passing from one wall to the next, should travel by pleasant successive stages. This means that if there are several paintings there must be a uniform scale to link them together, a uniformity that is not only in the scale of the design but also its colours. It may be better to paint, for example, a historical personage who is known to have worn a red cloak on that occasion in a grey one if grey will fit better into the general scheme, or to paint the trees blue or brown rather than green if that produces a better harmony. In short, a mural painting should be treated as if it were a page in a book of poetry and not as a chapter in a tome of history.
Having thus determined the general scheme and the details of composition, the artist makes a series of sketches trying out various ideas and possibilities of composition and ultimately deciding on those which best seem to fulfil the conditions imposed. He next makes the many necessary studies from life and ulti mately draws, from memory rather than from the models, the cartoon, that is to say, the outlines of the design in the actual size of the painting. He then transfers the cartoon by tracing to the wall, or to the canvas, which latter should be fixed to the wall by "marouflage"—a kind of glue partly formed of the remains of brush washings. The wall or canvas is now ready
for painting.
As a matter of aesthetic effect, it is well to remember that colours have a different carrying power, so that those parts of the wall which are in shade must be treated differently from those which are in light, and the colours in any case so orchestrated that they, as it were, hold each other in the same plane; otherwise the painting will look restless or patchy like a faded Gobelin.
It is further necessary to distribute the interest of the design over the whole surface, otherwise the effect of decoration will be lost, and, in the most favourable circumstances, a purely pictorial interest result ; for whilst easel pictures are a form of art in which concentration of interest within the frame is permissible and even desirable, mural paintings should have their interest so distributed that they fulfil their function, which is to decorate the larger architectural unit, like a pattern. For this reason, too, the decorator or his patrons should consider whether the archi tecture is of a kind that calls for mural paintings and would not perhaps be better served by ornamentation with colour of the architectural parts bearing the wallspaces to be covered with abstract pattern. The ceiling offers particular difficulties. If it must be painted otherwise than with simple colour or architec tural ornament at all, it is best to treat it as lightly as possible so as not to give its representations of nature the appearance of physical weight, and moreover to see to it that its main design links up architecturally everywhere with the walls so as to give the figures or other features a visible means of support— as Correggio did in the S. Paolo or Tiepolo in the Escorial ceilings. The mural painter's task is now the more difficult as he has the distracting experience of many styles of different ages and climes before his eyes or in his mind. The tendency in Eng land is towards a thin early Italian drawing and colouring, whilst on the Continent everywhere extravagance, either in subject or in treatment, down to perfect abstraction is in vogue. Every form of design is justifiable, provided it keeps within the spirit of the environing architecture and the purpose of the building. "Jazz" pattern in a church would be as unsuitable as "church" pattern in ball-, bath- or bed-room. (F. BN.) BIBLIOGRAPHY.—See the art section of bibliographies to articles on various countries, also those on individual masters, and GREEK ART, ROMAN ART, FRESCO, etc., and works on the general history of art, such as A. Venturi, Storia dell' Arte Italiana (15 vols., Milan, 1901-28). M. Jourdain, English Interiors in Smaller Houses, 166o-183o (1923), may be consulted. See also F. Hamilton Jackson, Mural Painting (1904) ; G. Ronchetti, Pittura Murale (191I) ; C. J. Wall, Mediaeval Wall Paintings