PICTURESQUE WORLD’S FAIR. AN ELABORATE COLLECTION OF COLORED VIEWS
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THE COURT OF THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT BUILDING.—In particular effects secured in the scores of imposing buildings within the grounds there were few more pleasing in many ways than that attained in the court connecting the pavilions of the French Building. This semi-circular colonnade forming the court and gallery was an admirable specimen of architecture in the Corinthian style, so far as its outside was concerned, and the device for the inclosure was such as to secure the attainment of the best effects. There were few places on the grounds more attractive to the lover of beauty and usefulness than this gallery and court, where were shade and the babbling of water in the fountain, where the cool breezes from the lake had play, and where the eye was gratified in whatever direction it might chance to turn. The fountain in the court was an admirably executed bronze production made in France and brought to America for the special use to which it was here devoted, and the landscape gardening, though necessarily on no extended scale, was in the style most popular in the country of which the building was the headquarters at the Fair. Upon the walls of the gallery were drawings which were almost a topographical history of France and a similar combination of the artistic and the practical extended to other features of the decorations. It was, indeed, a characteristic of the French idea as exploited in the whole building that the beautiful and materialistic should be blended together and so presented, and if a departure was made at all it was in the court’s interior.
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