development. One may go farther and quote the French claim that the
colour scheme of Louis XVI was intensely suggestive and personal,
while the Empire colouring was literal and impersonal.

Under Louis XVI furniture was all but lost in a crowd of other
articles, tapestry, draperies of velvet, flowered silks, little
objects of art in porcelain, more or less useless, silver and ormoulu,
exquisitely decorated with a precieuse intricacy of chiselled designs.

The Louis XVI period was rigid in its aristocratic sobriety, for
although torch and arrows figured, as did love-birds, in
decoration--(souvenirs of the painter Boucher), everything was set and
decorous, even the arrow was often the warrior's not cupid's; in the
same way the torch was that of the ancients, and when a medallion
showed a pastoral subject, its frame of straight lines linked it to
the period. Even if Cupid appeared, he was decorously framed or
pedestaled.

To be sure, Marie Antoinette and the ladies of her court played at
farming in the Park of the Petite Trainon, at Versailles; but they
wore silk gowns and powdered wigs. To be rustic was the fad of the day
(there was a cult for gardening in England); but shepherdesses were
confined to tapestries, and, while the aristocracy held the stage, it
played the game of life in gloves.

There was about the interior decoration of Louis XVI, as about the
lives of aristocratic society of that time, a "penetrating perfume of
love and gallantry," to which all admirers of the beautiful must ever
return for refreshment and standards of beauty and grace.

Speaking generally of the three Louis one can say that on a background
of a great variety of wonderful inlaid woods, ivory, shell,
mother-of-pearl and brass, or woods painted and gilded, following the
Italian Renaissance, or lacquered in the manner of the Orient, were
ormoulu wrought and finely chiselled, showing Greek mythological
subjects; gods, goddesses and their insignia, with garlands,
wreaths, festoons, draperies, ribbons, bow-knots, rosettes and
medallions of cameo, Sevres porcelain, or Wedgwood paste. Among the
lost arts of that time are inlaying as done by Boule and the finish
known as Vernis Martin.

PLATE XX

This large studio is a marked example of comfort and interest
where the laws of appropriateness, practicableness, proportion
and balance are so observed as to communicate at once a sense of
restfulness.

Here the com