utiful in colour, why not "star" it,--build
your room up to it? If you decide to do this, see that everything else
representing _colour_ is either subservient to the picture, or if
of equal value as to colour, that they harmonise perfectly with the
picture in mind.

PLATE XII

From a studio one enters a smaller room, one side of which is
shown here, a veritable Italian Louis XVI salon.

[Illustration: _An Italian Louis XVI Salon in a New York Apartment_]

We were recently shown a painting giving a view of Central Park from
the Plaza Hotel, New York, under a heavy fall of snow, in the late
afternoon, when the daylight still lingered, although the electric
lights had begun to spangle the scene. The prevailing tone was a
delicate, opalescent white, shading from blue to mauve, and we were
told that one of our leading decorators intended to hang it in a blue
room which he was furnishing for a New York client.

Etchings are at their best with other etchings, engravings or water
colours, and should be hung in rooms flooded with light and delicately
furnished.

The crowding of walls with pictures is always bad; hang only as many
as _furnish_ the walls, and have these on a line with the eye and when
the pictures vary but slightly in size make a point of having either
the tops of the frames or the bottoms on the same line,--that is, an
equal distance from floor or ceiling. If this rule is observed a
sense of order and restfulness is communicated to the observer.

If one picture is hung over the other uniformity and balance must be
preserved.

One large picture may be balanced by two smaller ones.

Hang your miniatures in a straight line across your wall, under a
large picture or in a straight line--one under the other, down a
narrow wall panel.

CHAPTER VIII

TREATMENT OF PIANO CASES

A professional pianist invariably prefers the case of his or her piano
left in its simple ebony or mahogany, and would not approve of its
being relegated to the furniture department and decorated accordingly,
any more than your violinist, or harpist, would hand over his violin,
or harp, for decoration.

When a piano, however, is not the centre of interest in a house, and
the artistic ensemble of decorative line and colour is, the piano case
is often ordered at the piano factory to be made to accord in line
with the period of the room for which it is intended, after which it
is decorated so as to harmonise with