lasso.  For if a man cannot find the noblest motives for his art in such simple daily things as a woman drawing water from the well or a man leaning with his scythe, he will not find them anywhere at all.  Gods and goddesses the Greek carved because he loved them; saint and king the Goth because he believed in them.  But you, you do not care much for Greek gods and goddesses, and you are perfectly and entirely right; and you do not think much of kings either, and you are quite right.  But what you do love are your own men and women, your own flowers and fields, your own hills and mountains, and these are what your art should represent to you.

Ours has been the first movement which has brought the handicraftsman and the artist together, for remember that by separating the one from the other you do ruin to both; you rob the one of all spiritual motive and all imaginative joy, you isolate the other from all real technical perfection.  The two greatest schools of art in the world, the sculptor at Athens and the school of painting at Venice, had their origin entirely in a long succession of simple and earnest handicraftsmen.  It was the Greek potter who taught the sculptor that restraining influence of design which was the glory of the Parthenon; it was the Italian decorator of chests and household goods who kept Venetian painting always true to its primary pictorial condition of noble colour.  For we should remember that all the arts are fine arts and all the arts decorative arts.  The greatest triumph of Italian painting was the decoration of a pope’s chapel in Rome and the wall of a room in Venice.  Michael Angelo wrought the one, and Tintoret, the dyer’s son, the other.  And the little ’Dutch landscape, which you put over your sideboard today, and between the windows tomorrow, is’ no less a glorious ’piece of work than the extents of field and forest with which Benozzo has made green and beautiful the once melancholy arcade of the Campo Santo at Pisa,’ as Ruskin says.

Do not imitate the works of a nation, Greek or Japanese, Italian or English; but their artistic spirit of design and their artistic attitude today, their own world, you should absorb but imitate never, copy never.  Unless you can make as beautiful a design in painted china or embroidered screen or beaten brass out of your American turkey as the Japanese does out of his grey silver-winged stork, you will never do anything.  Let the Greek carve his lions and the Goth his dragons:  buffalo and wild deer are the animals for you.

Golden rod and aster and rose and all the flowers that cover your valleys in the spring and your hills in the autumn:  let them be the flowers for your art.  Not merely has Nature given you the noblest motives for a new school of decoration, but to you above all other countries has she given the utensils to work in.