delighted to find an American sculptor applying his art to the intimacies of domestic design. Among the few sculptors who have used the figure decoratively in the arts of minor design none has displayed a livelier imagination or a more charming facility than Henry Linder. His little conceptions for candlesticks, inkwells, electric-light stands and other objects of domestic use are full of grace and spirit. Another decorative sculptor of rare feeling and unusual technical resources is M. M. Schwarzott. I remember well a panel of his representing fishes sporting in the waves, which, as Mr. Hartmann fitly observes, is worthy of a Japanese coppersmith. That very few sculptors have devoted themselves to domestic design is due as well to the dearth of really decorative genius among them as to the claims of other commissions upon the time of those few who possess it. Partly, perhaps, to a prevalence of “high-art” notions, which regard a statue as, of itself, more worthy than a decorated object, irrespective of the skill and craftsmanship or the beauty of the design involved. Yet, I doubt if a prejudice of this sort would deter a man really possessed of the decorative instinct. It is the lack of this and of appreciation on the part of the public for personal work which forms a bar to our advancement in the arts of design; this and the preference of the architects for reproducing commercially the time-honoured forms. Encouraged by them our rich people prefer a room in which every detail is dryly imitated from a dead period to one animated by the art and spirit of to-day. So they take their morning coffee _à la Louis Quinze_; their luncheon in a Dutch kitchen; drop into an affectation of Japan for a cup of afternoon tea; dine in the splendour of the _Grand Monarque_; sip their liqueurs in Pompeii, and rest at length from this jumble of inert impressions in a chamber _à l’Empire_. Small wonder if their appreciation of art should be a pose and their actual encouragement of it nearly null! OPEN-AIR DECORATION