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ART IN THE HOME AND IN THE SCHOOL:
EXAMPLES OF MURAL DECORATION BASED
UPON DUTCH TYPES AND SCENES
the present series of schemes for the mural decoration of the
chool-room and the nursery, France, England and Italy
ave, each in succession, provided an artist or artists from
'horn to draw suggestions; while Denmark, in the person of
tans Christian Andersen, has offered a poet whose child,
        .a ly, an11. an4m1c114  LersL lenllO themselves easily o pIc-
torial representation. The final schemes of the series now published,
are, for the most part, based upon the work of an American woman-
painter, Mrs. Marcia Oakes Woodbury, whose drawings of Dutch
children have recently brought her into wide and favorable notice.
This artist, equally successful in drawing and in color, is one who
does honor to the training which she received, first under Tommaso
Juglaris in Boston, and later in foreign studios.  Her figure-work,
often reproduced in magazines, is always clever and distinctive, femi-
nine in its piquancy, but filled with a vigor which usually flows from
a masculine hand. Her Dutch children are real, from their caps to
their sabots, with their ox-like eyes, their sea-roughened faces, and
their stout, stiff little bodies. Upon close examination, they appear
to be old friends whose acquaintance we made on a long past sunny
afternoon, when we were loitering on a park bench, and they playing
about the base of a statue erected to some hero of the Netherlands.
   This feeling is especially awakened by Mrs. Woodbury's group of
the "Soldiers of Wilhelmina," from which a frieze, intended for
a
nursery, has been composed by isolating the figures and placing them
in line, somewhat after the manner of Boutet de Monvel; not in the
useless attempt to parallel the drollery of the French children, but
in the confidence that the Dutch types, posed against a suitable back-
ground, will afford pleasure, as well to adults as to children, by char-
acteristics in which they too excel.
   This frieze, a unit or complete section of which is seen in illus-
tration, has a greater width than is usually found in such decorations;
and is made thus, in order to relieve the heavy outlines of the figures
from undue emphasis. The little peasants defiling beneath the flag
of Holland, with a single exception, are adapted from Mrs. Wood-
bury's figures; the one stranger in the group being the girl at the ex-
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