Word: plain
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...high noon one day this week, an invisible hand parted the red velvet draperies at the front of the U.S. Supreme Court's magnificently plain chamber. Through openings in the draperies and past the gleaming marble Ionic columns stepped nine men robed in black. Eight seated themselves in the black leather chairs at the long mahogany bench; the ninth went with the clerk of the court to a desk beside the bench. After a brief opening ceremony, Clerk Harold B. Willey turned to the man at his side and administered an oath: "I, Earl Warren, do solemnly swear that...
Mary Cassatt's most telling device was her own: she painted plain and sometimes charmless people in classically noble poses, and with the same care that earlier artists lavished on saints and goddesses. Coolheaded and warmhearted, easy and austere, her art had the perfect balance that only will power achieves. Beyond that, Painter Cassatt was blessed with psychological penetration as unwelcome in the Victorian age as it is prized today. In the picture opposite, the baby's burgeoning life subsides to bedtime weariness. Relaxed and perfectly possessive, the child clasps its mother's chin. The mother...
...than that "children move around more and read less." The modern educationalists have apparently forgotten that "if the child is to gain an understanding of the history of Western civilization, the 'doing' involved must include a great deal of reading, talking, listening, looking at pictures, and just plain thinking. Perhaps he can learn a little by building a mud replica of a medieval castle on a sand table, but it is very doubtful if the time is as profitably spent as it would be in reading a good history book...
...Gibraltar side, the captain goes soberly afoot from his ship to a conventional middle-class cottage. There he is cozily greeted by wife No. i, a plain but devoted homebody (Celia Johnson) who puts out his pipe and porter, serves up his favorite dumplings, and answers dutifully to his call for "beddy-byes" at 10 p.m. Otherwise, as the captain explains, he would be "no use on the bridge...
...Japanese Sunroom Bath by Designer John Wisner, which puts a huge white-tile tub smack into what otherwise looks like a pleasant, modern living room. ¶ A peaceful French provincial dining room by New Jersey Designer Lester Byock and his wife, who have an interesting idea for walls: plain pine panels washed with thin yellow varnish, then overlaid with a white rococo design. Most interesting feature: a white brick fireplace with a conical hood under which sits a copper brazier that can be used to cook an informal roast or light a formal dinner. ¶ A warm and woolly Explorer...