In the same way those artists are important who work according to the demands of decorative painting. A picture in a room should be like a jewel in its setting, in harmony. It should fit agreeably into the scheme of decoration, its colour in unison, its lines melodious, its general effect toning well with the general design.

These principles, taught by Morris, have had a formative influence on the work of a large number of artists. There arose a tendency which, by borrowing characteristic effects from woodwork, carpets, and stained-glass, and by the application of style to line as well as to colour, went one step further than Burne-Jones.

The pictures of John W. Waterhouse, for instance, are not only conceived in literary vein, but seen with the eye of a painter. By smooth, thick lines, by the discordant harmony of blues, greens, and violets, he gets a carpet-like effect which is highly decorative.

Byam Shaw, still a young man, is just another master of decorative lines. At the age of twenty-five he painted the picture "Love's Baubles," which now hangs in the art gallery in Liverpool. The subject he took from a poem in Rossetti's "House of Life." Beautiful women snatch after the fruit which a boy carries along on a salver. The whole is a harmony of melodious lines and rich, quiet colours.
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Next to Byam Shaw, G.E. Moira is the chief representative of this decorative school.
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Maurice Greiffenhagen surprises one by the ardour of his imagination, his strong emphatic line, and the tapesty-like beauty of his colour. He reminds one of Aman-Jean, such a wonderful "old-master-like" beauty is suffused through the picture "The Sons of God looked upon the Daughters of Men." No less effective is the "gourmandise" with which he gives his interpretation the appearance of an old picture. The colours, though full of sound and movement, are at the same time so etiolated and faint that one would think the picture had hung for centuries in a dusty corner of an old church, or that spiders had spun their webs across it; the frame too is in keeping, and enhances the general effect of solemnity.