SED TO BUY"]

It is because of this cowardice on the part of the great silent majority
that every year sees us backed farther and farther into a corner. We
walk through miles and miles of galleries, or else we are led through
them by our wives and our friends, and we look in vain for the kind of
pictures that mother used to make and father used to buy. What do we
find? Once in a while we behold a picture of something that we can
recognize without a chart, and it looms before our gladdened vision like
a rock-and-rye in a weary land. But that is not apt to happen often--not
in a 1912-model gallery. In such an establishment one is likely to meet
only Old Masters and Young Messers. If it's an Old Master we probably
behold a Flemish saint or a German saint or an Italian saint--depending
on whether the artist was Flemish or German or Italian--depicted as
being shot full of arrows and enjoying same to the uttermost. If it is a
Young Messer the canvas probably presents to us a view of a poached egg
apparently bursting into a Welsh rarebit. At least that is what it
looks like to us--a golden buck, forty cents at any good restaurant--in
the act of undergoing spontaneous combustion. But we are informed that
this is an impressionistic interpretation of a sunset at sea, and we are
expected to stand before it and carry on regardless.

But I for one must positively decline to carry on. This sort of thing
does not appeal to me. I don't want to have to consult the official
catalogue in order to ascertain for sure whether this year's prize
picture is a quick lunch or an Italian gloaming. I'm very peculiar that
way. I like to be able to tell what a picture aims to represent just by
looking at it. I presume this is the result of my early training. I date
back to the Rutherford B. Hayes School of Interior Decorating. In a
considerable degree I am still wedded to my early ideals. I distinctly
recall the time when upon the walls of every wealthy home of America
there hung, among other things, two staple oil paintings--a still-life
for the dining room, showing a dead fish on a plate, and a pastoral for
the parlor, showing a collection of cows drinking out of a purling
brook. A dead fish with a glazed eye and a cold clammy fin was not a
thing you would care to have around the house for any considerable
period of time, except in a picture, and the same was true of cows.
People who could not abide the idea of a cow in the kitchen gladly
welcomed