CHAPTER XVIII
Wall Painting the Oldest Colorful Art. First Murals by American Women, Mary MacMonnies and Mary Cassatt In Woman's Building, 1893. Violet Oakley, Her Murals In the State House at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
"To have the sense of Creative Activity is the great happiness,
and the great proof of being alive."—Matthew Arnold.
Wall painting is the oldest colorful art known to history, but the oldest form of picture for which man is responsible, is the Word-Picture. We have a developing word-picture in the first of Genesis: An angel of light with a flaming sword standing guard at the gate of Paradise, from whose beauty and peace the shamed and grief-stricken parents of humanity had been driven out, is the powerful and thrilling story that tells us all we know of the introduction of man to this world, which he was destined to subdue and fill with countless humans.
The first picture portrays Man in Paradise, beautiful as some may dream heaven to be, from which, because of disobedience, he was driven to earth. The second picture portrays Man on the earthward side of the unknown garden, and it expresses the tragedies of human life; disobedience and its train of sins, grief, shame, disappointment, and sweating toil for daily bread. It is a moving picture, and moves on to the children of man who disagree over the tenets of their religious opinions. Uneducated, unfrocked, the differences of opinion and belief lead to murder and its train of sins. That word-picture by an ancient writer of Hebrew scripture is but a negative that has been indelibly reproduced on the sensitized minds of millions who have harked back to that primitive pair,—mural picture, it seems, on the earth side of that invisible wall that still separates mankind from that unknown Paradise, wherein is the Tree of Life, whose fruit we long for even here.
Prehistoric man by degrees discovered various colors and used them to ornament his body and his cave walls, these decorations serving also as records of kingly achievements. Through past ages various civilizations have applied a crude art to their walls, not merely as decoration, but as a sort of record. Hence our next pictures are on man-made walls of tombs and temples, when Mena was king over the most ancient Egyptians known.
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