If tapestries must be painted, let them by all means follow the style of the ancient verdure or foliage tapestries, and be used for the same purpose—­to cover an otherwise blank wall.  This is legitimate, and even beautiful, but it is painting, and should be frankly acknowledged to be such, and no attempt made to have them masquerade as genuine and costly weavings.  It is simply and always painting, although in the style and spirit of early tapestries.  Productions of this sort, where real skill in textile painting is used, are quite worthy of admiration and respect.

I remember seeing, in the Swedish exhibit of women’s work in the Woman’s Building at the Columbian Exposition, a screen which had evidently been copied from an old bit of verdure tapestry.  At the base were broad-leaved water-plants, each leaf carefully copied in blocks and patches of colour, with even the effect of the little empty space—­where one thread passes to the back in weaving, to make room for one of another colour brought forward—­imitated by a dot of black to simulate the tiny shadow-filled pen-point of a hole.

Now whether this was art or not I leave to French critics to decide, but it was at least admirable imitation; and any one able to cover the wall spaces between bookcases in a library with such imitation would find them as richly set as if it were veritable tapestry.

This is a very different thing from a painted tapestry, perhaps enlarged from a photograph or engraving of a painting the original of which the tapestry-painter had never even seen—­the destiny of which unfortunate copy, changed in size, colour, and all the qualities which gave value to the original, is probably to be hung as a picture in the centre of a space of wall-paper totally antagonistic in colour.

When I see these things I long to curb the ambition of the unfortunate tapestry-painter until a course of study has taught him or her the proper use of a really useful process; for whether the object is to produce a decoration or a simulated tapestry, it is not attained by these methods.

The ordinary process of painting in dyes upon a wool or linen fabric woven in tapestry method, and fixing the colour with heat, enables the painter—­if a true tapestry subject is chosen and tapestry effects carefully studied—­to produce really effective and good things, and this opens a much larger field to the woman decorator than the ordinary unstudied shams which have thrown what might become in time a large and useful art-industry into neglect and disrepute.

I have seen the walls of a library hung with Siberian linen, stained in landscape design in the old blues and greens which give tapestry its decorative value, and found it a delightful wall-covering.  Indeed we may lay it down as a principle in decoration that while we may use and adapt any decorative effect we must not attempt to make it pass for the thing which suggested the effect.