CHAPTER XV.

GRAINING CONSIDERED AS A FINE ART.

Graining--that is painting in imitation of wood or of marble--is generally looked upon as a business branch of the house-painting which any competent painter is, or should be, able to do, but in reality we find that only about four or five men in each large city do all the best work in this line, and make a business of it, doing nothing else--"graining for the trade," as it is called. One grainer will do the work of twenty or more paint-shops, and if he is a first-class workman, he will earn more than double the wages of an ordinary painter, and will find employment all the year round.

Now, any large city can boast of twenty to thirty artists--landscape, marine, portrait, etc.--whose work is praised and is accepted at art-galleries, and in some cases brings enormous prices at sales; but why is it that their work is lauded to the skies; when at best it is but an imitation of nature, and when an equally good imitation in another form is (as a rule) condemned by architects and critics as unworthy a place in artistic residences or in the more prominent rooms of such houses? Any person of ordinary intelligence can at a glance discover that an oil painting is a mere copy or representation of nature, but the grain of wood or of marble can be so closely imitated that it is impossible even for an expert to detect at a glance that it is counterfeit, and a close examination sometimes fails to reveal whether it is genuine or not.

Some people think that successfully to imitate the color and the grain of any wood or any marble is as much of an art as is the representation of a landscape, for, while there are dozens of artists who can faithfully reproduce a landscape on canvas, there are few who can make a pine door look like the oak or cherry jamb and casing that surround it, as first-class grainers often have to do, and do so well that not one person in a thousand could tell the real wood from the imitation. And not only is the wood imitated by such men, but mouldings, cornices, panels, etc., are so faithfully represented as to pass for such except on close inspection.

It is said that in order to become an artist one must be born with certain qualifications or he will fail to be successful: this is equally true in the case of the grainer; and some people think that in order to become a first-class grainer more gifts are required at birth than if the person were destined to become an artist, as the artist generally has before him models or the original of his picture, while the grainer is supposed to imitate whatever kind of wood or marble is called for--in most cases, without any of the original before him and doing the work from recollection of the grain of the particular wood or marble he is imitating. While it is very true that the average imitation of wood or marble is poorly done, still the whole business should not be condemned, and any large city can furnish illustrations of the fact that graining is so well done as to deceive workers in wood; and they ought to be competent judges.

The idea of representing wood by painting is as old as any branch of the business, and, though excellent work has been done in days gone by, the efforts of the foremost grainers of the present time will favorably compare with those of any age, as, with new inventions to aid them, they have taken rapid strides toward perfection.