A valuable attribute of this conventional art is, that it puts no bounds to the fancy of the designer.  It is a figurative language in which he may get away from commonplace statement.  What has always seemed to me a very logical employment of convention appears in the Punch cartoons of Sir John Tenniel and Mr. Lindley Sambourne.  Even in those cartoons which are devoid of physical caricature (and they are generally free from this), we see at a glance that it is the political and not the personal relations of the personae that are represented; whereas in the naturalistic cartoons of Puck, for example, one cannot resist the feeling that personalities are being roughly handled.

[Side note:  Relation]

A chief principle in all decorative design and treatment is that of Relation.  If the space to be ornamented be a book-page the design and treatment must be such as to harmonize with the printing.  The type must be considered as an element in the design, and, as the effect of a page of type is broad and uniformly flat, the ornament must be made to count as broad and flat likewise.  The same principle holds equally in mural decoration.  There the design ought to be subordinate to the general effect of the architecture.  The wall is not to be considered merely as a convenient place on which to plaster a picture, its structural purpose must be regarded, and this cannot be expressed if the design or treatment be purely pictorial—­if vague perspective distances and strong foreground accents be used without symmetry or order, except that order which governs itself alone.  In other words, the decoration must be organic.

[Illustration:  FIG. 62 ALFRED G. JONES]

[Side note:  Classes of Decorative Design]

Decorative illustrations may be broadly classified under three heads as follows:  First, those wherein the composition and the treatment are both conventional, as, for example, in the ex-libris by Mr. A. G. Jones, Fig. 62.  Second, where the composition is naturalistic, and the treatment only is conventional, as in Mr. Frost’s design.  Third, where the composition is decorative but not conventional, and the treatment is semi-natural, as in the drawing by Mr. Walter Appleton Clark, Fig. 63. (The latter subject is of such a character as to lend itself without convention to a decorative effect; and, although the figure is modeled as in a pictorial illustration, the organic lines are so emphasized throughout as to preserve the decorative character, and the whole keeps its place on the page.) Under this third head would be included those subjects of a pictorial nature whose composition and values are such as to make them reconcilable to a decorative use by means of borders or very defined edges, as in the illustration by Mr. A. Campbell Cross, Fig. 64.

[Illustration:  FIG. 63 W. APPLETON CLARK]

[Illustration:  FIG. 64 A. CAMPBELL CROSS]

[Side note:  The Decorative Outline]