His advanced and unorthodox designs for the new Glasgow School of Art were accepted, and he received his first commission from Miss Catherine Cranston, whose series of elegant tea rooms became something of a social phenomenon in Glasgow at the turn of the century, thanks to Mackintosh's brilliant interiors.
A common African lizard, the black-necked agama (Acanthocercus atricollis), faces an enemy with head held high and mouth open to show the brilliant orange interior.
Steaks were presented as they are at Peter Luger: solo (no vegetable garnish), the meat cut off the bone, thickly sliced to show the brilliant red interior, then plated with the bone.
Colouring everything, like dark ink in the clear water of this prose, is a pervasive mood of melancholy and controlled excitement which is very visual – Cusk is brilliant at interiors, capturing a city busy changing itself at feverish speed.
Brilliant works of interior art like Tolstoy's novel tend to suffer terribly in the hands of those who would interpret them in other mediums.
One folio, attributed to Golu of Nurpur, shows a handsome prince taking leave of his mistress in an image starkly divided between a brilliant white marble interior and an all-black nighttime landscape punctuated by five moonlit trees.
The painting's reclining female nude gazes brazenly at the viewer and is depicted in a harsh, brilliant light that obliterates interior modeling and turns her into an almost two-dimensional figure.
As Hill says, they were "two perfectionists, with different ideas of perfection", and the brilliant designs for the interior that streamed from Pugin's pen were incessantly revised by Barry, and again by Pugin, and so on.
Currently she is in the kitchen inspecting the sweets, so we are made to confront her confectionaries: "chumchum dusted with icing sugar, black gulab-jamun with a secret interior of brilliant pink, the rolled yellow balls of laddu, sandesh like toy bricks, some with a coat of silver".
For inspiration, I turn to… Country Living, Coast and World of Interiors magazines brilliant must have.
