The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Theory Of Decoration

Examination Questions

1. How may we reproduce the effect of late French wall treatments?
2. What is fresco work?
3. What advice would you give a client as to the use of draped walls?
4. How is mosaic decoration produced? In what periods was it most used?
5. What are the successive coats of paint generally used? What are the characteristics of each?
6. How does the Fjnglish treatment of oak differ from the French ? 7. What is half-timber work?
8. If you were asked to decorate a living-room in the Italian style, what wall treatment would you suggest?
8. What materials are suitable for hearths and facings of mantels?
10. What do you understand by the rise and run of a step, and what are the best dimensions for each?
11. How does quartered oak differ from the plain sawed oak in appearance?
12. What kind of a floor would you use in decorating a quaint Colonial living-room?

Furniture Selection and Arrangement

Historic Development of Furniture

The development of the decorative arts in America dates almost from the earliest days of Colonial settlement in Virginia and New England. These sections were largely settled by intelligent types of Europeans, who had transferred their homes because of religious and political difficulties. Rather than suffer a curbing of that which they considered as liberty and justice, they separated from the historical and family associations of centuries and started life anew in a virgin land, to sow the seeds of a culture that has struggled to exist side by side with a political and commercial development whose rapidity of growth has been almost unequalled in history. It is a fact that the arts have often had least opportunity to grow amongst the races of greatest commercial prestige, and that they have not always flourished in periods of greatest political freedom.

The greatest Egyptian monuments were built by slaves. The Golden Age of Greece followed the Persian wars, its greatest monument being the Parthenon in Athens, and although this building has neither the dimensions nor the expression of power and duration of the Egyptian temples, nor the poetry of the Gothic cathedrals, it has the highest intellectual beauty ever developed in architecture.