Diners in the Berkeley Faculty Club's Heyns Room need only glance upward to just beneath the ceiling for clues about its origins. Spanning the 20-foot-wide room on the east and west walls are 28-inch-high murals, whimsical Grecian-like friezes that subtly recall the space's former use as the club's Billiards Room.

Billiards, including pool (or pocket billiards), was a popular faculty diversion in the early 20th century. It was also a passion of club president and chemistry professor Edmund O'Neill (Class of 1879), who asked art professor Perham Nahl to paint the murals soon after the room was added to the club's south wing in 1914. The murals' hint of debauchery marked the room as the male bastion that it then was (beginning in 1915 women were afforded only limited access to parts of the club deemed appropriate), while reflecting O'Neill's well-known sense of humor.

Nahl came from a family of distinguished artists dating from 17th-century Germany. A Realist and multitalented painter, etcher, lithographer, and illustrator, he is best known for his 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition poster of Hercules opening the Panama Canal.

His east mural celebrates the game of pool, its 15 balls held by a like number of playful nymphs in colorful flowing gowns. The fluid movement of the female figures rhythmically leads the eye to a tree at the far right, where a lone goat-hoofed satyr raises the white cue ball and commands the nymphs' attention. Nahl's classical treatment of these characters is reminiscent of California Decorative artist Arthur Mathews and the Arts and Crafts Movement. This animated composition is set against an abstract green pattern, a two-dimensional effect that distinguishes the east mural from the west.

Sixty feet away, the opposite wall is enlivened by three frolicking gowned nymphs, a likely homage to the three balls used in the game of billiards. In this spirited scene, a figure on the right is poised to toss a billiard ball over one of her playmates to another with arms raised in anticipation. Here Nahl painted a filigreed background of trees that create spatial depth and reveal glimpses of mysterious figures flitting in the woods. He had to jog this mural around a pair of double doorways that originally opened to the present Howard Lounge. In the 1950s, when billiards gave way to dining, these doorways were walled up, leaving the mural with two awkward notches where the doors had been. Not until 2000 did art professor emeritus Karl Kasten '38 complete the painting so compatibly with Nahl's design and technique that the former notches are apparent only by close examination.

Unlike the Nahl murals, which were painted on canvas and transferred to the walls, the mural by art professor Ray Boynton in the O'Neill Room, a small dining room added to the club's north wing in 1925, is an excellent example of the Renaissance technique of buon fresco. Boynton, stylistically a Social Realist influenced by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, revived this early Italian process of integrating pigments directly onto a fresh, absorbent plaster surface. Differing from studio easel painting, fresco work requires a disciplined application of colors in small areas called "day pieces," sized to be painted before the moist plaster can set and harden. The time-restricted process gives frescoes their characteristic limited color range and uncomplicated design.

Completed in 1930, the 15-foot-wide fresco, entitled Night and Day on the Berkeley Campus, occupies the room's south wall, varying from about eight- to- 10 feet high beneath the sloping ceiling. It depicts a low-angled view of the campus up Campanile Way. Centered in the foreground is the University seal, inscribed with its motto "Let there be light," flanked by two prominent nude figures: on the left, a male upholding the sun and on the right, a female supporting the moon.

Boynton would also use sun and moon icons four years later in San Francisco's Coit Tower, perhaps there symbolizing the passage of eras or, as speculated by author Masha Zakheim Jewett, the lights of Masonic tradition. But in the Berkeley fresco they suggest "the illumination brought by scholarship," as interpreted by club historian Phyllis Brooks Schafer, while the large size of the figures "implies the dominance of human endeavor in the campus setting."

For decades Boynton's fresco suffered from a greenish glaze, a distempura that may have been applied in the late 1930s for uncertain reasons but possibly to suppress the painting's nudity. Kasten again came to the rescue in 2000 to restore its original brilliance. Together with the Nahl murals, it is part of an important artistic and historic campus legacy.

A former Berkeley campus planner, Helfand is the author and photographer of Campus Guide: The University of California, Berkeley, the authoritative guidebook to Cal’s 132-year-old campus.