not be barrenness nor the bright colour gaudy.
For all beautiful colours are graduated colours, the colours that seem
about to pass into one another's realm--colour without tone being like
music without harmony, mere discord. Barren architecture, the vulgar and
glaring advertisements that desecrate not merely your cities but every
rock and river that I have seen yet in America--all this is not enough. A
school of design we must have too in each city. It should be a stately
and noble building, full of the best examples of the best art of the
world. Furthermore, do not put your designers in a barren whitewashed
room and bid them work in that depressing and colourless atmosphere as I
have seen many of the American schools of design, but give them beautiful
surroundings. Because you want to produce a permanent canon and standard
of taste in your workman, he must have always by him and before him
specimens of the best decorative art of the world, so that you can say to
him: 'This is good work. Greek or Italian or Japanese wrought it so many
years ago, but it is eternally young because eternally beautiful.' Work
in this spirit and you will be sure to be right. Do not copy it, but
work with the same love, the same reverence, the same freedom of
imagination. You must teach him colour and design, how all beautiful
colours are graduated colours and glaring colours the essence of
vulgarity. Show him the quality of any beautiful work of nature like the
rose, or any beautiful work of art like an Eastern carpet--being merely
the exquisite graduation of colour, one tone answering another like the
answering chords of a symphony. Teach him how the true designer is not
he who makes the design and then colours it, but he who designs in
colour, creates in colour, thinks in colour too. Show him how the most
gorgeous stained glass windows of Europe are filled with white glass, and
the most gorgeous Eastern tapestry with toned colours--the primary
colours in both places being set in the white glass, and the tone colours
like brilliant jewels set in dusky gold. And then as regards design,
show him how the real designer will take first any given limited space,
little disk of silver, it may be, like a Greek coin, or wide expanse of
fretted ceiling or lordly wall as Tintoret chose at Venice (it does not
matter which), and to this limited space--the first condition of
decoration being the limitation of the size of the material used--he w