Silas and Persis show their lack of cultivated artistic taste with their
choice of decorations. In their drawing room, their room for the
reception of important company, are four different statues, one of which
is described as “the what-not of an earlier period”. Not only is
frivolous, its origin in unknown. Compare this to the portraits in
the Corey dining room (195-6). Lapham mistakes a portrait of Nanny
Corey’s grandmother for the girl herself, until Mrs. Corey corrects his
error, converses a bit upon the subject of ancestors, and then refers to
a portrait artist. Lapham ends up being more confused than before
she explained, but it does elucidate the difference between their tastes.
Their heritage is very important to the Coreys, since heritage marks one
of the distinctions between “old” and “new” money. The length of
time and cultivation as shown by good breeding makes all the difference.
Apparently, good artistic taste is a result of centuries of fine manners
too. Where the Coreys have “carved Venetian scrigni”, fluted marble
columns, and an elegant staircase” (187), the Laphams spend money on gaudy
sculptures and “costly and abominable frescoes” (25). When Silas shows
Barley a picture of his family, it is a photograph instead of a painting,
unframed and warped. (7). Perhaps the most fitting comparison in
the artistic respect is that Bromfield Corey considers himself a painter
while Silas only makes the paint. Where Corey is aristocratic and
refined, Lapham is crude and countrified. Where Corey knows about
the techniques of portraiture and has his “theory of Titian’s method” (70),
Lapham knows how to make good paint and what kind of oil to mix it with.
When Lapham does venture into the realm of painting, he covers everything
in sight with paint. Lapham boasts, again to Bartley, that every
bare space around his hometown has “Lapham’s Mineral Paint – Specimen”
on it. After all, as he says “I never saw anything so very sacred
about a big rock… that it wouldn't do to put mineral paint on it in three
colors” (14-5). Mrs. Corey exhibits the kind of taste in painting
on a level with her husband's when she mentions to Tom that “there was
one of [Silas’] hideous advertisements… painted on a reef that we saw as
we came down” (72).