"Decorative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Waldo Story one admirable portrait bust is of Cecil Rhodes. A decorative work, a fountain for the Rothschild country estate in England, is charmingly designed as a Galatea (in bronze), standing in a marble shell that is drawn by Nereids and attended by Cupids. The happy blending of marble and bronze gives ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... antiquarian relics, chiefly in the decorative branch of art, preserved in the northern counties, pourtrayed by a very competent hand.... All are drawn with that distinctness which makes them available for the antiquarian, for the artist who is studying costume, and for ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... put in place; and also the fruits and bon-bons, which may be commingled with the flowers in working out a decorative design, or they may be placed, in ornamental dishes, at the four corners of a wide table, to balance the flowers in the centre; or, they may be arranged along the middle of a long table. For fruit, silver-gilt baskets, ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... increasing frequency the King was in residence at Versailles. He urged on the builders who had in hand the construction of the living-rooms, kitchens, stables; he supervised the placing of pictures and other decorative works in various parts of the expanded chateau; impatiently he chided the superintendents for delay and feverishly they strove to meet his demands for greater haste. And though every hour of haste cost ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... towards the end of the seventeenth century, his invention of plate glass, which finally drove Venetian mirrors out of the markets of the world. The Venetian mirrors, charming as they are from the aesthetic point of view of decorative art, are simply blown glass rolled flat, cut, polished, and tinned. The art of making them came, like other arts, to Venice from the East, and in the sixteenth century the Venetian mirror was the true 'glass of fashion' all over Europe. The famous 'Galerie des Glaces' at Versailles, of which ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... existence had developed great ingenuities. They had the boomerang and the weet-weet, but not the bow; the throwing stick, but not, of course, the sword; the message stick, but no hieroglyphs; and their art was almost purely decorative, in geometrical patterns, not representative. They deemed themselves akin to all nature, and called cousins with rain and smoke, with clouds and sky, as well as with beasts and trees. They were adroit hunters, skilled trackers, born sportsmen; they now ride well, and, for ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... rest, she contented herself with an expedition to Whitford, accompanied by Miss Bracy and her two enchanted pupils, and there laid in a stock of purchases, unpretending and in good taste, aiming only at what could be well done, and not attempting the decorative wardrobe of a great lady. Ethel was highly amused when the Misses Anderson came for their inspection, to see their concealed disappointment at finding no under garments trimmed with Brussels lace, nor pocket-handkerchiefs all open-work, except a centre of the size of a crown-piece, and ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... with pitch or bitumen. "Bored stone axes are found in the tropical regions of America. Although they are very rare, they are well executed."[201] The device of boring stone axes appears at the end of the stone age in the lake dwellings of Switzerland. Perhaps they were only decorative.[202] The Polynesians used stone axes which were polished but not bored or grooved, and the edge was not curved.[203] The Pacific islanders clung to the type of the adze, so that even when they got iron and steel implements from the whites they preferred the knife of a plane to an ax, because ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... vanity, had grown, expatiating, florid, eloquent, over everything, without and within—windows, house-fronts, church walls, and church floors. And one-half of the male inhabitants were big or little State functionaries, mostly of a quasi decorative order—the treble-singer to the town-council, the court organist, the court poet, and the like—each with his deputies and assistants, maintaining, all unbroken, a sleepy ceremonial, to make the hours just noticeable as they slipped away. At court, with ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... manuscript that the two published volumes of it were printed. The library forms part of the Museum, which occupies a ground-floor wing of the castle. The first room is an armoury, in which all kinds of arms are arranged, in a decorative way, covering the ceiling and the walls with strange patterns. The second room contains pottery, collected by Casanova's Waldstein on his Eastern travels. The third room is full of curious mechanical toys, and cabinets, and carvings ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... I was some chilly in the ankles. I'd called for J. Bayard at his hotel, and he'd shown up with the Major. No figment of the imagination, either, the Major. He's a big, husky, rich-colored party that's some imposin' and decorative in open-faced togs; quiet and shy actin', though, just as Steele had said. I sort of took to him, and we swaps ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... this series Duerer has found the true balance of his powers. The dignity and charm of the decorative effect of these cuts has never been surpassed; and to the racy narrative vivacity of such groups and figures as those isolated and enlarged in our illustration there is added an idyllic charm of which perhaps the best examples are the Visitation and the Flight into Egypt. This sweetness ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... valve seat by a second knife blade attached to the lever. The ornamental column forming the stand of the safety valve is cast iron and does much to decorate the interior of the cab. The pipe carrying the escaping steam projects through the cab roof. It is made of copper with a decorative brass band. This entire mechanism was replaced by a modern safety valve for use at the Chicago Railroad Fair (1949). Fortunately, the old valve was preserved and has since been replaced on ...
— The 'Pioneer': Light Passenger Locomotive of 1851 • John H. White
... passed were bare, and that the floor was littered with unpacked boxes and gun-cases. He also observed for the first time that maps of the colony, with the coffee-plantations and mahogany belt marked in different inks, were not perhaps so decorative as pictures and mirrors and family portraits. And he could have wished that the native servants had not stared so admiringly at the guests, nor directed each other in such aggressive whispers. On those other occasions, when the wives of the Councillors came to ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... and capitalization Decorative features of final letters, especially -ll printed with connecting line Font changes such as boldface instead of small capitals Prices are printed inline as ijs. ...
— Animaduersions uppon the annotacions and corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer's workes - 1865 edition • Francis Thynne
... from antique bronzes, brought out into strong relief by a background of tapestry, adorned this lofty hall, which had none of that confusion of decorative objects, in the midst of which some modern artists seem to pose themselves ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... or art, and everything for cheapness and profit. From this man and by laborious study and practice in his spare time, aided by a certain measure of natural ability, the boy acquired a knowledge of decorative painting and ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... in the Italian Venus the breasts are so small as to be scarcely traceable; the body strong, and almost masculine in its angles; the arms meagre and unattractive, and she lays a decorative garland of flowers on the earth. These signs mean that the Italian thought of love as the strength of an eternal spirit, for ever helpful; and for ever crowned with flowers, that neither know seed-time nor harvest, and bloom where there is neither ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Paris desired to have in the Champ de Mars a serious and useful exhibition, so it began by paying no sort of attention to the decorative and architectural side of its two pavilions, placed in the centre of the upper garden between the monumental fountain and the central dome. It was not afraid, in spite of its surroundings, to shelter itself within the simplest of buildings in plaster, with a ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... this period of great prosperity. Hiram Powers, of Cincinnati, the ablest sculptor of his country, was greatly hurt because Congress refused him the contract for the decorative work on the magnificent Capitol in Washington, at last nearing completion. His aspirations were not unreasonable, for his Greek Slave, a beautiful work in marble, had captured the imagination of both American ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... morning, as soon as it was day, he hastened to come into the city and to make every preparation for the funeral. He likewise deputed messengers to proceed ahead to the Temple of the Iron Fence to give, that very night, additional decorative touches to the place where the coffin was to be deposited, and to get ready tea and all the other necessaries, for the use of the persons who would be present at the reception ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... represented the Seven Acts of Mercy. One of them went to France and decorated the Chateau of Madrid for Francis I. Pope Leo X. employed another to pave the Loggie of the Vatican with Robbia tiles, and these wares, in one form and another, were used in numberless ways, both useful and decorative. ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... of Nero, for one of the baths of the imperial villa at Antium, in whose ruins it was found in the fifteenth century. From the time of the Romans, the white marble of the Montes Lunenses has been used for decorative purposes in many of the churches and public buildings of Italy. It formed the material out of which Michael Angelo, Canova, and Thorwaldsen chiselled their immortal works. Its quality and composition, however, vary very considerably, and small crystals of perfectly ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... sort of milestones I'd like to leave. Only decorative ones, of course. I wish to keep my lane free from weeds and ugly, jagged ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... mystified by the cloverleaf-like symbol that appears on the feature key. Its oldest name is 'cross of St. Hannes', but it occurs in pre-Christian Viking art as a decorative motif. Throughout Scandinavia today the road agencies use it to mark sites of historical interest. Apple picked up the symbol from an early Mac developer who happened to be Swedish. Apple documentation gives the ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... scene, likewise the charming bits of immorality who danced through his reign. However much we may disapprove their manner of life, we are ever glad that their taste sanctioned—more than that—urged, the production of a decorative style almost unsurpassed. To the artists belong the glory, but times were such that an artist must die of suppression if those in power refuse to patronise his art. So we are glad that Antoinette Poisson appreciated art, ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... and physicians. It was quite expensively fitted up; and the plate-glass front glittered with gold-and-black sign-lettering. The chairs and sofas were upholstered in black leather. On the walls hung several decorative advertisements of fire-insurance companies, and maps of the town, county, and state. Rolls of tracing-paper and blueprints lay on the flat-topped tables, reminding one of the office of an architect or civil engineer. A thin young man ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... who know most of Indian sacred and decorative symbols, we learn that two main ideas are outstanding: desire for rain and belief in the unity of all life. Charms or prayers against drought take the form of clouds, lightning, rain, etc., and those for fertility are expressed ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... however, he happened to go into the chapel to see how the colours were lasting in some decorative work which he had done there himself years before, and there he found his father standing in the aisle to the right of the altar near the door of the sacristy, gazing up fixedly at a particular panel in the dark oakwork which covered that portion ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... old tradition of decorative art, and they had among them skilful jewellers. Several specimens have been found, and are to be seen in museums; but the noblest of all these is that which is ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... twelve years and more of marriage, they were very good friends; or, why not say, old acquaintances? There are two kinds of crystallisation in love affairs, with all respect to M. de Stendhal. One kind hardens the surfaces without any decorative effect. There are no facets visible, no angles to catch the light. In the case of the Macartney marriage I suspect this to have been the only kind—a kind of callosity, protective and numbing. The less they were thrown together, she found, the better friends they were. At home they ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... our sky line," continued the New Yorker, "and it is likely that we are not yet artistic in the construction of our buildings. But I can safely assert that we lead in pictorial and decorative art. In some of our houses can be found masterpieces in the way of paintings and sculpture. One who has the entree to our best ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... have been reproduced by Edward L. Wilson, editor of the Philadelphia Photographer. Another book which abounds in valuable and practical information for the amateur and can be highly commended, is "Art Recreations, a Guide to Decorative Art," by Marion Kemble, published by S. W. Tilton & Co., Boston; also J. Bacon's "Theory of Coloring," issued by Geo. ...
— Crayon Portraiture • Jerome A. Barhydt
... with muddy boots, it is to be presumed, were sent round to the back. A riding-cloak, the relic apparently of a highwayman, hangs behind the door. It is the sort of cloak you would expect to find there—a decorative cloak. An umbrella or a waterproof cape would be fatal ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... which, though of small artistic merit, seem to represent the whirl of the world with all its men and monsters, struggling from life into death and back to life again. The reliefs in the great corridors of Angkor are purely decorative. The artist justly felt that so long a stretch of plain stone would be wearisome, and as decoration, his work is successful. Looking outwards the eye is satisfied with such variety as the trees and houses in the temple courts afford: looking inwards it finds similar variety ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... enlightened amateur—"see, how that charlatan of a Fossati has taken care not to increase the number of trinkets now that we are in the reception-rooms. These armchairs seem to await invited guests. They are known. They have been illustrated in a magazine of decorative art in Paris. And that dining-room through that door, with all the silver on the table, would you not think a ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... notwithstanding it made a most disagreeable impression on me. They were very richly attired, particularly the first three, who were tres grands seigneurs in Annam,—heavily embroidered silk robes, feathers, and jewels, and when they didn't open their mouths they were rather a decorative group,—were tall, powerfully built men. They knew no French nor English—spoke through the interpreter. My intercourse with them was very limited. They were not near me at dinner, but afterward ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... with many additions of a general character; many cases of ancient Roman, Greek, and Byzantine coins; more than an hundred almost priceless examples of old Italian carvings, in marble and stone, with some dozens of ancient articles of decorative furniture; reproductions of delicately-wrought articles of Persian Art work, plate belonging to the old City Companies, the Universities, and from Amsterdam and the Hague; a collection of Wedgwood and other ceramic ware, the ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... iron of the middle ages, and of the time of the Renaissance, and even down to the last century, in Italy, France, and Germany showed, in the crudest examples, the principal virtues of all true decorative art. The reason is not far to seek. The difficulties in the way of working the material with ease imposed certain limitations in design and execution which could not well be disregarded. The lack of machinery (which is responsible ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, No. 7, - July, 1895 • Various
... locket. There, too, with a not unbecoming gleam of barbaric colors, shone the string of porcupine beads to which the Indian charmstone hidden in her bosom was attached. It all harmonized with the time, the place, the atmosphere. Anywhere else it would have been preposterous as a decorative presentment, but here, in this little nook where the coureurs de bois, the half-breeds, the traders and the missionaries had founded a centre of assembly, it was the best possible expression in the life so formed at hap-hazard, ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... of the spirit manifested in the entire architecture of the nation, and in the other of occasional efforts of superstition as distinguished from that spirit; and, farther, that in the one case, I was speaking of decorative features, which are ordinarily the results of feelings, in the other of structural features, which are ordinarily the results of necessity or convenience. Thus it is rational and just that we should attribute the decoration of the arches of St. Mark's ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... the river. In the famous Picture-Gallery of Bridgewater House, Lord Beaconsfield harangued his disconsolate supporters after the disastrous election of 1880, and predicted that Conservative revival which he did not live to see. Close by at Spencer House, a beautiful specimen of the decorative work of the Brothers Adam, the Liberal Party used to gather round the host, who looked like a Van Dyke. Another of their resorts was Devonshire House, which Horace Walpole pronounced "good and plain as the Duke of Devonshire ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... hardy perennial, can stand our worst winters without any covering, and it grows about so high from the ground (indicating two or three feet), with its geranium-like leaves, and the flower grows about three feet high, all covered with pink bells on the stems. It is a very decorative plant and perfectly hardy. I think it has been much neglected in the Northwest because it is so perfectly hardy and it increases very rapidly. I have over ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... musical instruments, etc., found in the ruins of their homes, as well as what is indicated by the skulls described in this interview. Their dwellings exhibit remarkable constructiveness in the inmates, and in many instances a high power of decorative art.] ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... In decorative and especially in ceramic art, as early as the fourth and fifth dynasties, we have vases, cups, and other vessels showing exquisite beauty of outline and a general sense of form almost if not quite equal to Etruscan and Grecian ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... mere stylist. The art of writers who are too consciously that is a sort of decorative representation of life, a formal composition, not a plastic composition. One element particularly characteristic of Jacobsen is his accuracy of observation and minuteness of detail welded with a deep and intimate understanding of the human heart. His characters ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... presence in the Villa du Lac had delighted M. Polperro's southern, sentimental mind; he felt her to be so decorative, as well as so lucrative, a guest for his beloved hotel. Mrs. Bailey had never questioned any of the extras Madame Polperro put in her weekly bills, and she had never become haggard and cross as other ladies did who ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... dress &c. (fashion) 852; dressed to kill, dressed to the nines, dressed to advantage; in Sunday best, en grand tenue[Fr], en grande toilette[Fr]; in best bib and tucker, endimanche[Fr]. showy, flashy; gaudy &c. (vulgar) 851; garish, gairish|!; gorgeous. ornamental, decorative; becoming &c. (accordant) 23. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... beautiful, poor dear, and she is not invariably gracious, it is true; yet, on the whole, how much the atmosphere of office life has gained in amenity by the coming of the stenographer, the typewriter, and the telephone girl, not to speak of her frequent decorative value in a world that has hitherto been uncompromisingly harsh and unadorned! Men may affect to ignore this, and cannot afford indeed to be too sensitive to these flowery presences that have so considerably supplanted those misbegotten young miscreants known as office-boys, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... all—except that here and there fluttered bits of paper that had once been a pack of cards. The clay slab was carved deeply—a man can do much of that sort of thing with two hours to waste. Most of the decorative effects were arrows, or hearts, or brands, but in one corner were the words, "passing the love of woman," which was a little impressive after all, even though Tom had not meant them, being, as I said, only an ordinary battered Arizona cow-puncher ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... that that would have been a pity. Besides, with that prevision given to an author, I am strongly of opinion that something will happen before long. And if the worst comes to the worst, there is always that story of my First Love wherewith to fill the time. Meanwhile I am approaching a decorative old Surrey town, little more than a cluster of ripe old inns, to one of which I have much pleasure in inviting the reader ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... the one or the other, so we find in both the same traditionally classic tragedy and comedy, which the man of culture is in duty bound to admire or at least to applaud. The multitude is satisfied, when it meets its own reflection in the farce, and admires the decorative pomp and receives the general impression of an ideal world in the drama; the man of higher culture concerns himself at the theatre not with the piece, but only with its artistic representation. Moreover the Roman histrionic art oscillated in its different spheres, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... in spirited fashion. "While many years are spent by a boy in gaining knowledge, of which the chief value is that it constitutes 'the education of a gentleman;' and while many years are spent by a girl in those decorative acquirements which fit her for evening parties; not an hour is spent by either of them in preparation for that gravest of all responsibilities—the management of a family."[11] "For shoe-making or house-building, for the management of a ship or a locomotive-engine, ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... the house almost silently and through the green drawing-room window again and up the broad stairs with Sir William Hamilton's huge decorative painting of an Ardayre group of his time, filling one vast wall at ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... ardour of her femininity she entered into the purchasing of the yellow opera cloak. They paid for that decorative garment the sum of two thousand five hundred francs. It seemed it was embroidered, and the ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... decorative part of the garden, and what Pesotsky contemptuously spoke of as rubbish, had at one time in his childhood given ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... delicate and fragile flowerets, though I am so infatuated by their brilliant sisters. They are lovely to examine, and, as individuals, very precious, but in my opinion useless for decorative purposes. In a body they confuse one another, and you ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a happy household. A master decorative workman, only lacking a touch of genius to be a sculptor, his pride is in his artistic handiwork. His happiness in his good wife Josephine. His heart centres ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... sun drew another blaze from the free-bosomed earth. Whereupon a neighbour's little girl, at the behest of her mother, duly craved and received permission from Bess to gather a few poppies for decorative purposes. But of this I was uninformed, and when I descried her in the midst of the field I waved my arms like ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... don't, mother, you know you don't care whether a picture's decorative or not; you don't care ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... a bright, amusing fellow and delightfully typical of his class. He had seen a year's service with the cavalry on the Eastern front, had been seriously wounded and was now attached to the General Staff in Berlin in what I judged to be a decorative rather than a useful capacity, for, apart from what he had learnt in his own campaigning he seemed singularly ignorant of the development of the military situation. Particularly, his ignorance of conditions on the ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... proportion to their weight and even size. The imbecility of this, and its probable effect on the reputation of Laurel Run at the General Post-office, being pointed out by Mrs. Baker, stamps were adopted as local currency, and even for decorative purposes on mirrors and the walls of cabins. Everybody wrote letters, with the result, however, that those SENT were ludicrously and suspiciously in excess of those received. To obviate this, select parties made forced journeys ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... It was a fancy head—the head of a stately and long muzzled dog with a ruff and with tulip ears. In short, just such a dog as Chum. Not knowing that Chum was a collie and that poster artists rejoice to depict collies, by reason of the latter's decorative qualities, Ferris was ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... disappointing. Here were acres of straight green lines hardly higher than gooseberry-bushes, and without a single tree to break the monotony or to cast a welcome shade. The bunches of grapes looked inviting enough, hanging among their decorative leaves and tendrils, but they had not been thinned and consequently were smaller than English hothouse grapes, while exposure to wind and dust had removed most of their bloom; but, in spite of their comparatively homely appearance, the children soon found that the fruit tasted ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... way. There were patterns on the wall-paper, on the carpet, on the tablecloth and curtains, until the eye ached for a clean surface without a design. And there were so many ill-matched colors, misused for decorative purposes, that Lambert shuddered to the core of his artistic soul when he beheld them. To neutralize the glaring tints, he pulled down the blinds of the two windows which looked on to a dull suburban ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... a rooster bookplate illustration at the beginning and an owl bookplate at the end. Each chapter begins and ends with a decorative woodcut. ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... are in regular, set patterns in rich tints; some are simply in solid colors. These last are found in the famous terrace-temple of Borsippe, near Babylon. We know from ancient writings that there were decorative paintings in Babylon which represented hunting scenes and like subjects, and, according to the prophet Ezekiel, chap. xxiii., verse 14, there were "men portrayed upon the wall, the images of the Chaldeans portrayed with vermilion, girded ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... commonly supposed, but at midnight. Owen Wister, in his fine novel, The Virginian, speaks of the lover's journey as taking place at dusk. Now the half-moon could not scientifically be low at that early hour, and although most poets care nothing at all for the moon except as a decorative object, Browning was generally precise in such matters. An American poet submitted to the Century Magazine a poem that was accepted, the last ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... of beauty, now beginning to acquire consciousness, and sorely afflicted by the decorative scheme that had been adopted in Barty's bedroom, found solace in the faces of these two women. Even the lazy consideration of the contrast between their types, was a comfort to Larry, and distracted his mind from the wall-paper (which suggested the contents of Dr. ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... of that benumbing shame which sometimes seizes those who would try literature confessing to those who have succeeded in it, and the occasion was too important for the decorative diffidence that might have occurred to her if it had been trivial. She had herself well gathered together, and she would have been concise and direct even if there had been more ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... Brays, as in Nellie's regime, continued to wear the common gray percales, and to eat off the common white crockery. And with a strange, bewitched pertinacity, the fine, decorative bits of china, shut away on their upper shelf in the safe continued to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... consume. He is a positive shape, a practical corporation, and the best he can see is the mirror held up to him by his bards of the Press and his jester Frank Guffaw. There, begirt by laughing ocean-waves, manifestly blest, he glorifies his handsome roundness, like that other Foam-Born, whom the decorative Graces robed in vestments not so wonderful as printed sheets. Rounder at each inspection, he preaches to mankind from the text of a finger curved upon the pattern spectacles. Your Frenchmen are revolutionising, wagering on tentative politics; your Germans ploughing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Robinson, F.S.A., in a paper on "Decorative Plaster Work," read before the Society of Arts in April, 1891, refers to the ceilings at Audley End as presenting an excellent idea of the state of the stuccoer's art in the middle of James I.'s reign, and adds, "Few houses in England can show so fine a series of the same date ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... of the mountains, and to a point halfway up these slopes—the last timber-line—clumps of spruce and balsam trees were scattered over the green as if set there by the hands of men. Some of these timber-patches were no larger than the decorative clumps in a city park, and others covered acres and tens of acres; and at the foot of the slopes on either side, like decorative fringes, were thin and unbroken lines of forest. Between these two lines of forest lay the open valley of soft and undulating ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... It had been his sole success in art, and had been exhibited at the Grafton Galleries under the name of The Gilded Lily. No one had ever known or was ever likely to know whether the title referred to the decorative, if botanically impossible, blossom in her hand, or to the golden ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... opponents, particularly by Lord Brougham, once his friend, but now his bitterest enemy. On the twenty-fourth of April, however, Durham sailed from Plymouth in H.M.S. Hastings with a party of twenty-two persons. Besides his military aides for decorative purposes, he brought in his suite some of the best brains of the time, Thomas Turton, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and Carlyle's gigantic pupil, Charles Buller. It is characteristic of Durham that he should bring a band of music with ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... designer of such figures has but a limited choice of subject, since there are few living creatures whose forms possess dignity without being cumbrous. The sculptor in this instance has followed well-established precedents in designing the lions according to the canons of decorative art. They are as realistic as would be suitable for figures of this size, and ...
— Handbook of The New York Public Library • New York Public Library
... be said that in pictorial and other arts there are some designs that are purely decorative and apparently have no living and inner ideal to express. But this cannot be true. These decorations carry the emotional motive of the artist, which says: "I find joy in my creation; it is good." All the language of ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... now a curious breath from Europe. A young fellow just beginning letters, and no fool, turned up here with a letter of introduction in the well-known blue ink and decorative hieroglyphs of George Meredith. His name may be known to you. It is Sidney Lysaght. He is staying with us but a day or two, and it is strange to me and not unpleasant to hear all the names, old and new, come up again. But ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Curtall Fryer. The Text written in Early English Style with decorative Initials, Head and Tail-Pieces and Borders and numerous full-page Drawings illustrating the moving incidents in the Old Ballad. Illustrated and described by M. ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... his knees clasped between interlacing fingers, Benton sat on the stone sea-wall and affected to whistle up a lightness of heart. Near at hand sprawled a picturesque city, its houses tinted in pea-greens, pinks and soft blues, or as white and decorative as though fashioned in icing ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... The Reichstag's decorative scheme is panelled oak and gilt-paint. The members' seating space spreads fanlike round the floor, with individual seats and desks exactly like those used by schoolboys, which is not an inappropriate simile. On the extreme right are the places of the Conservative-Junker—landowners—Party; ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... for any social recognition unless one had a long, green cucumber pickle in one's dinner-pail—the longer the pickle the higher one's standing. Fads ranged all the way from this gastronomic level to the highly esthetic, where they broke out in a desire for the decorative in the form of peep-shows. A peep-show was an arrangement of flowers and leaves pressed against a piece of glass and framed in colored tissue-paper. Every girl had one on her desk; even to dirty, unkempt Becky Davis. Elizabeth was not a success at such works of art. She was a wonder at inventing ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... "I only see and recognize studies; I can't materialize them, and until they are drawn, no one can profit by them. In this partnership we revolutionize decorative art. There are actually birds besides fat robins and nondescript swallows. The crane and heron do not monopolize the water. Wild rose and golden-rod are not the only flowers. The other day I was gathering lobelia. The seeds are used in tonic preparations. It has an upright stem with flowers ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... those leaves with serrated, or deeply cleft and indented edges, lend themselves most readily to decorative treatment. Large, broad leaves, with unbroken surfaces, and triangular or rounded outlines, are less manageable. Those most commonly taken ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... on the one hand, and Swinburne on the other, in reviving the decorative instinct of the Middle Ages. While Ruskin, in letters only, praised that decoration Rossetti and his friends repeated it. They almost made patterns of their poems. That frequent return of the refrain which was foolishly discussed by Professor Nordau was, in Rossetti's case, of such sadness ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... many tragedies in her family, besides this affair of the curate. Her own sister, Mrs. Jekyll, had a most unhappy life; through no fault of her own, I am sorry to say. She ultimately was so broken-hearted that she went into a convent, or on to the operatic stage, I forget which. No; I think it was decorative art-needlework she took up. I know she had lost all sense of pleasure in life. [Rising.] And now, Gertrude, if you will allow me, I shall leave Mrs. Cheveley in your charge and call back for her in a quarter of an hour. Or perhaps, dear ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... such as we have discussed, it is obvious that there is no possible explanation except through selection. This brings us to the last kind of secondary sexual characters, and the one in regard to which doubt has been most frequently expressed,—decorative colours and decorative forms, the brilliant plumage of the male pheasant, the humming-birds, and the bird of Paradise, as well as the bright colours of many species of butterfly, from the beautiful blue of our little Lycaenidae to the magnificent azure of the large Morphinae ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... familiar to the public," etc., etc. This gives a very fair idea of the nature and objects of my "Royal Academy." My aim was to burlesque not so much individual works as general style, not so much specific performances as habitual manner. As an example I take the work of that clever decorative painter and etcher, Mr. R. W. Macbeth, A.R.A. By his permission I here reproduce reductions in black and white of three of his well-known pictures, and side by side I show my parody of his style and composition—not, as you will observe, a caricature of any one ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... drama is a rigid form, limited to the two hours' traffic of the stage. Just as the decorative artist has to fill the space assigned to him and must respect the dispositions of the architect, so the playwright must work his will within the requirements of the theater, turning to advantage the restrictions ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... hung all over with bunches of brilliant scarlet fruit, which, when we get near enough to see, we find to be tiny tomatoes. Other houses have pumpkins also and melons and chillies, all hanging out to get dried, so that they look quite decorative with their strange adornments. Suddenly our attention is called to a broad strip of black earth, in shape like a river, flowing down the hillside, but made up of huge blocks as if it had been turned up by a giant ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... to use the most blood-curdling and decorative style of language now on the market when you engage in the pleasing duty of hurting a player's feelings. This will attract attention to you from all quarters, and will stamp you as a gentleman of ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... its simplicity. The mere story and the allegorical design enjoyed perhaps his equal favour. He believed in both with an energy of faith that was capable of moving mountains. And we have to remark in him, not the parts where inspiration fails and is supplied by cold and merely decorative invention, but the parts where faith has grown to be credulity, and his characters become so real to him that he forgets the end of their creation. We can follow him step by step into the trap which ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... (W. XVI). A cupola crowning a corner tower; an interesting example of decorative fortification. In this reproduction of the original pen and ink drawing ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... looked out upon, stood perfectly straight and upright across the sky to the south of them a row of magnolias (grandiflora) at least sixty feet high, with their boles, as smooth as the beach, trimmed bare for two-thirds of their stature. The really decorative marks of the trimming had been so many years, so many decades, healed as to show that no harm had come of it or would come. The soaring, dark-green, glittering foliage stood out against the almost perpetually blue and white ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... out again—which was soon after I had taken my seat in the car—I discovered what a mistake I should have made if I had followed my first impulse. For, upon examining the stitches more carefully, I perceived that what I had considered a mere decorative pattern was in fact a string of letters, and that these letters made words, and that ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... splendid encumbrance, and mightn't the sacred rage at any rate be kept a little in abeyance by thus creating for his comrade's mind even in a world of irrelevance the possibility of a relation? What was it but a relation to be regarded as so decorative and, in especial, on the strength of it, to be whirled away, amid flounces and feathers, in a coupe lined, by what Strether could make out, with dark blue brocade? He himself had never been whirled away—never at least in a coupe and behind a footman; he had driven ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... pictures, which were painted for Madame Dubarry, representing frolicsome scenes, young people playing games. At the foot of the Rue des Dominicains, in a large house with bulging iron grating, are some decorative paintings attributed to Flemish artists. These pictures are shown by courtesy. In the centre of the old town is the parish church, built in the 11th cent., but altered and repaired in the 17th. It contains several pictures, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... hair, not crisp and tufted like the hair of the dwarfish earlier race. Of this second conquering race, tall and handsome, we have abundant traces, gathered from many lands where they dwelt; bodies preserved by art or nature, in caverns or sepulchres of stone; ornaments, pottery, works decorative and useful, and covering several thousand years in succession. But better than this, we have present, through nearly every land where we know of them in the past, a living remnant of this ancient race, like it in every ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... in labour whatever. In a little while the mere absence of occupation for so great a multitude of people everywhere became an evident social danger, and the government was obliged to resort to such devices as simple decorative work in wood and stone, the manufacture of hand-woven textiles, fruit-growing, flower-growing, and landscape gardening on a grand scale to keep the less adaptable out of mischief, and of paying wages to the younger adults ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... shell was displayed on each of the little sideboards, which, with the addition of a tea-tray and caddy, a few more shells on the mantelpiece, and three peacock's feathers tastefully arranged above them, completed the decorative furniture ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... us are under the impression that the only real football fan is molded from the male sex and that the female of the species attends the game for decorative purposes only. I protest. Listen. In 1908 I had the good fortune to be selected to enter the Harvard-Yale Game at New Haven, for the purpose of scoring on Yale in a most undignified way, through the medium of a drop-kick, Haughton realizing that while a touchdown ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... gone," I asked, "that insane, extravagant idea of——" I was about to launch into one of my old-time harangues about the sheer vanity of decorative dress, when my eye rested on the moving figures in asbestos, and ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... statues—of angel faces, fluttering raiment, flowing hair, love-laden youths, and stationary figures of grave saints, mid wayward tangles of acanthus and wild vine and cupid-laden foliage; but the subordination of these decorative details to the main design, clear, rhythmical, and lucid, like a chaunt of Pergolese or Stradella, will enrapture one who has the sense for unity evoked from divers elements, for thought subduing all caprices to the harmony of beauty. It is not possible elsewhere in Italy ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... his master, the great pictures in which he exemplified his principles remain cold and uninteresting. The "Homer Deified," reproduced here, was originally intended as a ceiling for the Louvre, and from a decorative point of view would excite a pitying smile from Veronese or Tiepolo. Taken bit by bit, as a beautiful exhibition of supreme knowledge, of the evasive quality of style in drawing, it is, however, admirable, and as a ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... enterprising best to justify that title. It was almost an apotheosis of architectural bad taste. Disfigured by all manner of moldings, cornices, grilles and dinky plush curtains—head-bumping, dust-catching, useless—it was a decorative orgy, as well as one of the very foundations of ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... American product with almost a century and a half of service since Lewis M. Norton conceived it in 1808 in Litchfield County, Connecticut. There in 1845 he built a factory and made a deserved fortune out of his decorative ingenuity with what before had been plain, unromantic yellow ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... commanding a prospect of four mountain ranges, outlined in tender hues of lavender and turquoise against the cobalt sky. In the foreground stretches a fertile plain, with bamboo and sugar-cane varying the eternal rice in brilliant shades of green and gold, always decorative, from the first emerald blade to the amber-tinted straw, for the sacred grain possesses a beauty far exceeding that ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... at the old mansion opposite the Roman town of Reculver in Kent. The house is still known as Brooke-farm; and the original gateway of decorative brickwork still exists. He was buried in Reculver Church, now destroyed, where a mural monument was erected to his memory, having a rhyming inscription, which told ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Chestnut Street which was then being erected, and which Ellsworth pronounced atrocious, they had fallen to discussing art in general, or the lack of it, in America. And it occurred to him that Ellsworth was the man to carry out his decorative views to a nicety. When he suggested the young man to Lillian, she placidly agreed with him and also with his own ideas of how ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... Charles I to the throne, decorative features were added to the fashions. Colored ribbons, displayed in bunches at the knees, on doublets and as ties to hold back flowing locks, came into vogue along with flaring boots elaborately trimmed on the inner side of the flare, which was turned back. The women's costumes also underwent similar ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester
... and went, growing older and more characteristic, more and more "Beauty Steele," accompanied by legends of wild deeds and days at college, by tales of his fopperies and the fashions he had set, she herself had grown, as he had termed it, more "decorative." He had told her so, not in the least patronisingly, but as a simple fact in which no sentiment lurked. He thought her the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, but he had never regarded her save as a creation for the perfect pleasure of the eye; he thought her the concrete glory ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... rather too closely, followed all her steps and all her movements a little too perseveringly with my eyes, for she mesmerized me by the grace and alertness of her action—by the deft, cleanly, and even decorative effect resulting from each touch of her slight and fine fingers; and when, at last, she subsided to stillness, the intelligence of her face seemed beauty to me, and I dwelt on it accordingly. Her colour, however, rising, rather than settling ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... dust-covered in an attic in Vienna. It had two keyboards, tortoise-shell naturals and ivory sharps. It had eight stops, one imitating the lute and one the flute. The sounding board was elaborately painted with flowers and other decorative symbols, while the inside lid was ornate ...
— How the Piano Came to Be • Ellye Howell Glover
... described as "the most venerable symbol employed in ornamental art and the favourite and most highly decorative motif in artistic design". It has been the inspiration of much, if not most, of the world's great literature in every age and clime, and the nucleus around which a wealth of ethical symbolism has accumulated throughout the ages. The dragon-myth represents also the earliest doctrine or systematic ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... from about 1885. A few writers who are decidedly "of the period" are, as a matter of strict chronology, somewhat earlier. But the chief tendencies may be divided into seven periods. They are (1) The decay of Victorianism and the growth of a purely decorative art, (2) The rise and decline of the AEsthetic Philosophy, (3) The muscular influence of Henley, (4) The Celtic revival in Ireland, (5) Rudyard Kipling and the ascendency of mechanism in art, (6) John Masefield ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... be a useless task, however, to seek in these quaint devices a strict pourtrayal of the scenes appertaining to the countries they might be supposed to illustrate; to do so would be to forget their chief purpose, the decorative. But, allowing for the liberty usually granted to the artist, nay, often exacted by him, the scenes depicted are not borrowed from the realms of "Idealism" to the extent that has ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge
... handmade | | Voiles are cool and always dainty; that white Middy | | Blouses are jauntier with matching Skirt; that Cricket | | Sweaters are "Sportsiest." | | | | The Sub-Deb Shop—understudies the "Deb" in outfitting | | the "Sub!" Are your years between 13 and 16—here are | | Sports Frocks; decorative Georgettes; bright cool Prints | | for a summer morning; pastel Chiffons or buoyant | | Taffetas for the evening party. And in Coats—there's | | the slim "wrappy", the Cape-back. | | | | When Youth Steps Out—if it's young youth, it chooses | | for ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various
... * * * * * represents a decorative line in the original. A few lines were added by the transcriber at a page break when ...
— The Only True Mother Goose Melodies - Without Addition or Abridgement • Munroe and Francis
... comparatively simple outline has often been tackled, and he will find many charming single features, such as doors, or balconies, or windows. Good examples of these are the exquisite oriel and other decorative features of the house of Mr. W.K. Vanderbilt, by Mr. Hunt, in Fifth Avenue, at the corner of 52d Street, and specimens will also be found in 34th, 36th, 37th, 43d, 52d, 56th, and 57th Streets, near their junction ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Mr. Parsons' ripe taste has shown him the way. Then there are lovely morsels from his hand associated with the drawings of his friend Mr. Abbey—head-pieces, tailpieces, vignettes, charming combinations of flower and foliage, decorative clusters of all sorts of pleasant rural emblems. If he has an inexhaustible feeling for the country in general, his love of the myriad English flowers is perhaps the fondest part of it. He draws them with a rare perfection, and always—little definite, delicate, ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... her daughter and this young man amiably conversing. Mr. Nelson had something not unlike the carriage and tone of a gentleman; he talked quietly, though light-heartedly, and from remarks he let fall it appeared that he was somehow connected with the decorative arts. Minnie and he dropped into a discussion of some new ceramic design put forth by Doulton's; they seemed to understand each other, and grew more animated as they exchanged opinions. The hostess, meanwhile, kept glancing at them with ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... version of the text of the Fourth Edition, with accurate notes, a biography of both Omar and Fitzgerald, and a Poetical Tribute by Andrew Lang, together with a remarkable descriptive and comparative article by Edward S. Holden. Beautifully printed in two colors on deckel edge paper, with decorative borders, fourteen half-tone illustrations by Gilbert James, and a portrait of Fitzgerald. Gilt tops, attractively bound in cloth and gold, and each volume encased in a flat box with cover. Size, 5-1/4 x 7-5/8. ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... there on the roadsides behind the lines queer sacks hung from wooden poles. They had round, red disks painted on them, and looked like the trunks of human bodies after Red Indians had been doing decorative work with their enemy's slain. At Flixecourt, near Amiens, I passed one on a Sunday when bells were ringing for high mass and a crowd of young soldiers were trooping into the field ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... the existence of mineral-bearing veins. Gold was taken, however, among these prehistoric people, mainly from the stream-beds, or placer deposits, where it had been concentrated by nature. Gold was used more as a decorative or useful material than as a medium of currency, among the Aztecs, as among the Incas of Peru. However, in Mexico, transparent quills full of gold-dust were used as money. Gold ornaments figured largely in the military pomp and domestic decoration. ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... as drinking-vessels—lota is the pretty name—and big brass plates out of which they eat their rice and dhalbat. They keep them beautifully polished with sand, and I think they ought to be rather decorative; much more attractive certainly than the candlesticks and pots and cheap rough silver-work which is the usual loot carried away ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... to appear in the newspapers, but mostly without the illustrations. Later newspaper developments were to introduce more of the picture element, decorative border, and design. The ideas of European artists were freely drawn upon, but put to so utilitarian uses that their originators would scarce ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... exactly a decorative object, this Heiney; but he's kind of a picturesque ruin. His widest part is around the belt; and from there he tapers both ways, his shoulders bein' a good eight inches narrower; and on top of them, with no neck to speak of, is a head ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... the figure of Mercury, the wreath-bound heads, the sacrificial act itself, were all such as he could imagine from ancient Greece. Indeed, the whole picture is like a copy of an antique bas-relief; and in the original cartoon there is, below the picture, a decorative border studied from antique sculpture, and below that still an ornamental edge which was very common ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... or decorative art only, that has been touched by Japanese example of Incident and the Unique. Music had attained the noblest form of symmetry in the eighteenth century, but in music, too, symmetry had since grown dull; and ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... generally believed, only an illuminator, he continued, with subtle delicacy and accurate, almost timid design, to illuminate in larger proportions on his panels, those figures which are often only parts of a decorative whole. But in his later works while still preserving the simplicity of handling, and the innate character of his style, he displays a new tendency, and learns to give life to his figures, not only by the expression of purity and sweet ecstasy, but in finer particularization ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... ETC, FOR "FITTING up."—Time was when our ancestors were content to stick their preserved specimens in boxes with nothing to break the blank of white paper which backed them up. Nowadays we have arrived at such a pitch of decorative art in taxidermy, as in all things, that this stiffness of outline does not suffice; accordingly, we break our background by flowing lines of beauty, produced by the graceful aids of dried ferns and grasses, twigs of ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... case the topic was very successful. Mr. Saffron embraced it with eagerness; with much animation he discussed the merits, whether practical or decorative, of various uniforms—field-gray, khaki, horizon blue, Air Force blue, and a dozen others worn by various armies, corps, and services. Alec was something of an enthusiast in this line too; he soon ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... glasses and goblets, having stems of enclosed white and colored enamel tubes twisted together with transparent glass, which look as if they had delicate threads of color running through them. Then the Bohemians and the Austrians make many great beakers or drinking glasses, steins, and bowls with decorative coats of arms upon them in gold or ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... the time of Richard, painting had been mainly a decorative art, and the object of making pictures was to adorn the pages of a book, or the walls and vaults of a building. The most vital artistic energies of Western Europe in the thirteenth century had gone into the building of the great cathedrals and abbeys, ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... conscientious poet); passages where something was wanted for the sake of the plot, but he did not care about it or was hurried. The conception of the passage is then distinct from the execution, and neither is inspired. This is so also, I think, wherever we can truly speak of merely decorative effect. We seem to perceive that the poet had a truth or fact—philosophical, agricultural, social—distinctly before him, and then, as we say, clothed it in metrical and coloured language. Most argumentative, didactic, or satiric poems are partly of this kind; and in imaginative poems anything ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... jellies in the way just described are chiefly for decorative effect, they do add very greatly to the pleasure of eating them; but jellied fruits, as distinguished from fruits in jelly, are a delicious mode of eating fruit, and where it is in abundance afford a ...
— Choice Cookery • Catherine Owen
... decorative and exclusive side of the island, it was none the less enchanting in Sally's vision. A measure of confidence reinfused her mood. She surrendered absolutely to fatalistic enjoyment of the gifts the gods had sent. Half closing her eyes, she drank deep ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... life. In their mapping function they stand to perception in general in the same relation in which sight and hearing stand to touch—Spencer calls these higher senses only organs of anticipatory touch. But our eyes and ears also open to us worlds of independent glory: music and decorative art result, and an incredible enhancement of life's value follows. Even so does the conceptual world bring new ranges of value and of motivation to our life. Its maps not only serve us practically, but the mere mental possession of such vast pictures ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... however, that the excellence limits itself to the ornament. The human figure is wretchedly incorrect—even barbarous. It may be asked why is this? How is it that while the decorative portion of an illuminated book is beautiful in the highest degree, both in line and colour, and yet occasionally the artist seems not to have the remotest idea of the true shape of hands and feet or any part of the human body? Of course the usual ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... geometrical—sometimes directly so, as in the system developed by the Moors. Will the psychology of the new dispensation find expression through some adaptation of four-dimensional geometry? The idea is far from absurd, by reason of the decorative quality inherent in many of the regular hypersolids of four-dimensional space when projected upon ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... foundation of the industrial arts. The stone axe, or celt, was first made for a distinct service, but, in order to perfect its usefulness, its lines became more perfect and its surface more highly polished. So we might say for the spear-head, the knife, or the olla. Artistic lines and decorative beauty always followed the purpose of use. This could be applied to all of the products of man's invention to transform parts of nature to his use. On account of the durability of form, the attempt to trace the course of civilization by means of the ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... appalling as the abruptness with which members of the lower orders divest diplomacy's kernel of its decorative outer shell. "What I meant is—ah—" He set his monocle, and stared as if Tripe were an insect on a pin-point. "Since you admit you're in the business of intriguing for the princess, no doubt you carry letters to, as well as from her, and hold your ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... here too a few chapters on Toilet or Decorative Medicine, a branch of art to which modern physicians have devoted perhaps too little attention, with the natural result that it has fallen largely into the hands of charlatans of both sexes. Gilbert's chapter "De ornatu capillorum" offers the following sensible introduction: ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... a firm at Sioux Falls undertook to manufacture table tops, mantels, pedestals, and various decorative articles out of sections of this agatized wood by cutting them into the desired forms and polishing them. Tiffany and Company, the famous jewellers, also used this material for the base of the beautiful silver testimonial presented ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... Regular Departments Constant Attention will be given to Fine Art, Illustration. Wood-Carving, Art Criticism, Artistic Photography, Decorative Art, Sketching, Ceramics, Industrial Art. Biographies of Artists. Paintings in 011 and Water Colors, Pyrography, Modeling in Clay, Home Decoration, China Painting, Architectural Plans. Embroidery, ...
— Wholesale Price List of Newspapers and Periodicals • D. D. Cottrell's Subscription Agency
... 12 Rue St Antoine, a narrow street in Rouen, leading from the Place de la Pucelle, was opened by Madame de la Tour, in the millinery business, in 1817, and tastefully arranged, so far as scant materials permitted the exercise of decorative genius. She was the widow of a once flourishing courtier maritime (ship-broker), who, in consequence of some unfortunate speculations, had recently died in insolvent circumstances. At about the same time, Clement Derville, her late husband's ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... scramble over the wall of the neighboring house and help themselves to the beautiful lilies which bloom in old Wieland's garden. In these stories the historical personages, which with artistic discretion are kept in the background, constitute after all only a decorative element; in the foreground happy youthfulness disports itself in its irresponsibility. "O you poor young folks of today," exclaims the young Weimar authoress, "if you had any idea what riches, what abundance of life the young folks had at their command at the beginning of our ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... acquired means would refer to certain styles of decoration and hangings which they had seen in the Pullman parlor-cars. He had never seriously regarded the influence of the furnishing of these cars upon the travelling public; now he realized that, in a decorative sense, they were a distinct factor and a very ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... Mrs. Gwilt-Athelstan, albeit a decorative personality, is constructed on the same broad and generously graceful lines as her own victoria. The great lady has not only two chins, but what any fair-minded observer would accept as sufficient promise of a good third. Yet hardly could a slighter person display to advantage the famous ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... casually deserted even for a proper purpose. Hence, while X 99 was absent on his errand of mercy, the valuable shop of Messrs. Trinkett and Blouse, ecclesiastical tailors, was broken into, and several stoles, chasubles, altar-cloths and other decorative tapestries were appropriated ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... regarding him with patient dignity. "We remember all that. But where it came from is what we thought you'd know." He closed the illustrated paper and moved it out of reach, while the man brushed from his beard the grass and stuff that Judy had arranged there cleverly in a decorative pattern. ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood |
