It is to be remembered also that actual size and apparent bulkiness are by no means the same thing. Slender structural parts and graceful lines reduce astonishingly the apparent size of a piece of furniture. A finely designed sofa in one of the eighteenth century English or French styles appears to be a third smaller than a present-day over-stuffed sofa of the same actual dimensions; and the same differences in mere bulkiness and in apparent as distinguished from actual dimensions mark the French fauteuil and the American tub chair, Hepplewhite and Craftsman tables, Pompeiian and Renaissance floor lamps, and so on throughout the whole range of furniture. Thus the decorator may choose furniture consonant not only with the size but also with the character of any room, making the pieces increasingly less bulky and more light and graceful as the motive of the room becomes increasingly more animated and gay, and emphasizing the effect thus produced by the use of textures of closer weave, greater power of reflecting light and lighter and more delicate coloring.

This point is worthy of further emphasis. For reasons which it would be tedious to attempt to analyze here there is a very widespread idea that mere bulk is in some way essential to comfort in furniture. Thus many women feel that a living room, to be comfortably furnished, must, regardless of its size, have a big davenport and two or more big chairs. When these pieces, together, usually, with a reading table and a piano, have been installed in a small room there is very little space for anything else, and to the mind there seems to be none at all. Living in such a room is like living in a crowd. The room is hopelessly out of scale, and its bad proportions are aggravated by the physical necessity of keeping such other pieces as are essential to the uses of the room as much smaller than they ought to be as the big pieces are larger than they ought to be.

Figure 28. - This group is well constituted, but the individual units are so large as to give to the narrow hall an unpleasant effect of over-crowding - an effect intensified by the use of small, light rugs.

The same effect of incongruous proportion is often seen in the bedroom, where for the sake of more drawer space or larger mirrors, or by reason of a singularly inept preference for mere mass, furniture is chosen of a size that dwarfs the room; in the dining room, where a table so large as to destroy the organic harmony of the treatment is chosen because the doily service will look well when there are eight for luncheon; and especially in the den. We have all seen this tiny den, so popular a few years ago, with its one big Turkish chair and its big reading table, around which one must thread his way gingerly in order to avoid knocking over the smoking table, the magazine rack, and the one small remaining chair. Of course no one with the slightest feeling for form or fitness could be comfortable in such a room. As a matter of fact no one ever tried to be; for such rooms were no sooner furnished than they were deserted, to remain of no more value in the economy of the household than an unused closet.

While we are here concerned with the individual decorative units only as they help to form an organic whole, it must be noted that the same general principles of proportion apply to their design. The legs of a table, for example, or of a chair or sofa, must be of a size that seems to the mind such as would naturally have grown on a piece of its dimensions and weight. Undoubtedly short straight legs two inches in diameter would be sufficient to support the largest davenport; yet such legs would appear grotesquely inadequate and ugly. When we see such a piece supported by bun legs four or five inches in diameter, however, we are satisfied. A small light-toned picture in a very heavy frame is as unsatisfactory as a large dark-toned picture in a very light frame. A nine by twelve rug with a border twenty-seven inches wide lacks beauty of proportion, as does a rug of the same size with a nine-inch border.

Figure 30, taken, with its accompanying comment, from Mayeux's "La composition decorative," page 153, perfectly illustrates the principle involved. The panel composition. The consoles, designed too thin (c) in connection with columns too thick, seem to bend under the burden they bear; inversely, at (d) they appear clumsy and of an exaggerated weight and strength in connection with the load they bear. Similarly, the relationships between the columns and the canopy must be congruous; so that the latter will be neither too heavy (e) nor too light and narrow (f).

Figure 29. - The legs of this sofa are in fact quite strong enough to support its weight; yet they appear to the mind to be inadequate and even grotesque.

A, one of the fanciful decorative subjects much employed during the Renaissance and later, shows a figure resting upon a bracket supported by two foliated consoles. These consoles also support two little columns which serve to hold up the canopy. Although the design is a work of pure fancy, and the actual strength of the scaffolding is of no importance, nevertheless the mind is perturbed and dissatisfied if any element of the composition appears to be too light or too heavy, too narrow or too wide, for the whole, as in B.

A.

B.

Figure 30.