subjects." So the pupil stayed on in Rome for five years, sharing
his studio later with Aristide Sartorio, now a leading Italian
painter. Here, in the Via Flaminia, he painted his first
important mural decoration, for the dining room of Mrs. Potter
Palmer's Chicago Lake Shore mansion. This work, called "The
Vintage," is decorously inebriate, a vinous riot of little
cupids. It led, shortly after his marriage in 1887 to Miss Maud
Howe, a daughter of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, to his establishing
himself in Chicago, where he did many decorations and portraits.
In 1894, he went back to Rome to execute a commission for a huge
ceiling piece for the Boston Public Library. The piece was for a
room later converted into a children's room, and after the canvas
was placed, in 1901, the incongruity of the adult painting and
the purposes of the room caused unfavorable comment. But the room
has been recently readjusted. It is now lined with high oak
shelves, almost to the cornice, filled with musty old books of a
beautiful brown--perhaps the most effective decoration in the
world--and the ceiling tells at its true value.

This ceiling, fifty feet square, divided into two equal panels,
represents the twenty Christian centuries, as horses, led by the
hours (winged female figures) out of the mists of the past into
the illumination of the present. The models for the horses were
the undersized nags of the Roman Campagna, which are "small but
decorative beasties," as Mr. Elliott puts it, and lend themselves
to a slightly conventional treatment. They sweep two by two, out
of a cool mistiness, round the ceiling past the suggestion of a
pale moon, into the full radiance of the golden orb of the sun.
The triumph of the picture is its handling of the problem of
light. This golden daybreak pierces the mists whereon the horses