_St. Ives, Cornwall; London_
Going from Concarneau to St. Ives was like moving up from the thirteenth
to the seventeenth century. No more thatched roofs, no more floors of
beaten earth, no more manure piles in front of the houses. The roofs are
of slate, topping little stone houses, with quite proper floors; the
front yards are clean, and the Cornish farmer is most likely a Wesleyan,
but he may belong to one of the other thirteen denominations that
flourish in this town of five thousand inhabitants. It is true that
there is a circle of stones which archæologists say was placed before
the time of the Picts; there are some customs handed down from centuries
before; but most of the “ancient laws” are no earlier than Henry VIII,
and the old traditions are so changed that the original makers would not
recognize them, for the Englishman _will_ think for himself, even though
he thinks badly.
The waves that come to St. Ives Bay are straight from America, and there
is nothing to equal the beauty of the cliffs and sand except the coast
of Maine. The climate is five degrees less than that of Naples and never
goes over eighty degrees in summer or much below freezing in winter, so
that vegetables and flowers flourish. In January are growing violets,
dahlias, and fuchsias for the markets of London. South of St. Ives are
five miles of flowers blowing in the breezes. The real beauty of the
country is the constant storm, shower and sunlight. If it is not
raining, it is shining, and there is a rainbow almost any day—a little
Legion of Honor wandering around by itself.
Of the different religious denominations, there were the Christian
Brethren, Temperance Wesleyans, Plain Wesleyans, Lady Huntington’s
Chapel, Church of England, and the Catholic. The butcher, grocer, and
carpenter were all preachers on Sunday. Perhaps the most interesting of
the sects, however, were the Primitive Christians. They do not believe
the altar or the pulpit is any more holy than other parts of the church,
so you will see them kneeling with their faces to the back, to the
sides, or any way whatever, while the minister is hard at work preaching
at one end.
Right in back of my studio, which was a storehouse for pilchard nets and
consequently on the sea, was the old graveyard. Here the stanch
Cornishmen were buried four or five layers deep, and occasionally the
tide would wash a hole in the wall, scattering the bones, and rolling
skulls up and down the beach. The new graveyard was much more modern,
with a careful division between the Church of England and the
Dissenters, the different entrances separated, as I think my dear mother
thought heaven was—one gate for the Unitarians and one for the remainder
of the world. I remember a carpenter who accidently cut off his thumb.
He was not nearly so worried about the pain as that he might go through
all eternity thumbless; so he anxiously saved the piece and, waiting
until there was a funeral, dropped it into the grave, being very
careful, however, that it was on the Dissenter side of the cemetery (he
being a Wesleyan preacher on Sunday). The picture of any part of his
body wandering around in a Church of England heaven was something he
could not bear to contemplate.
The Cornish have some peculiar uses of the English language, some of the
expressions going back to the Elizabethan period. They never use an
objective, but say “to I” or “for we”; then there is “on” for “in” and
“coolth” and “dryth.” “Minching” means stealing or playing hooky and
comes from the same source as “Miching mallecho” of Shakespeare.
Nearly the entire life of these people is spent in the fishing industry,
as it is in Concarneau; only here the pilchard takes the place of the
sardine. All along the shore are built little whitewashed cabins,
glistening in the distance like seagulls. Here, during the fishing
season, men sit all day long, watching for that unmistakable faint
purple ruff on the water that indicates the run of fish. At the first
sign they stand upon the cliff and wave the branch of a tree. Everyone
quits work; children rush up and down the shore, waving green branches
and shouting the fishing call at the top of their voices. If you look
out upon the water you can see a place where the “hair of the animal”
has been rubbed the wrong way. There is great rivalry as to which
company gets the best schools of fish, and they row madly to beat one
another, sometimes having very serious fights. The costume is very
different from that of the Bretons, the men wearing tarpaulins and high
boots; but the catch is just as large, sometimes taking three days to
empty the large circular nets that have been drawn up like a purse.
When I went to St. Ives it was unknown as an art colony, the place where
they gathered being Penzance, about ten miles away. Whistler had been
there two years before, but Robinson was the sole representative of the
clan upon my arrival. When I left, five years later, there was an Art
Club of one hundred members. The term “Cornish school” came into being
from a remark of Stanhope Forbes to Whistler’s enemy, Harry Quilter, the
critic, who asked:
“Why do all you men of the Cornish school paint alike?”
(They were all painters who had studied in France and learned their
trade.)
“We use the same model,” answered Forbes.
“Ah, that’s it! Who is she?”
“Nature.”
Seeing this colony form in St. Ives made me study out how such things
happen. The artist finds a place that is beautiful, undiscovered, and
suits his pocketbook. He goes there for two years. The third year other
artists follow him; the fourth year come the retired British admirals
and “vamps”; the fifth year the artist leaves; the sixth come the
wealthy people who spend a lot of money on it, making it as ugly and
dear as possible, but soon tire and go away. Then the artist comes back
again and begins all over, picking the bones of what the Money Bags had
killed.
The home of Leslie Stephen, in St. Ives, was the gathering place for all
sorts of interesting persons. He married Thackeray’s daughter, knew many
notables, and was the biographer of most of them. He entertained such
men as E. W. Gosse, the critic and brother-in-law of Alma Tadema, the
famous painter of finished Greek subjects. It always seemed to me so
extraordinary to see one of his Greek slaves with manicured toenails,
leaning up against a marble column upon which you could see the polish,
with a truly Bostonian expression on her face!
Curious to say, I met Lowell here, and, although he immediately called
me “Edward” and spoke of my mother as “Mary,” I did not remember him at
Concord, and was ignorant enough not to know much about his work. One
day Stephen remarked that music, like eating, should be done in the
bathroom. It always sounded to him like an infernal din. He was the
ultra-literary type, who wished to be rid of all things physical; he
even envied Harriet Martineau, who had no sense of taste. Lowell said:
“Edward, this foolish friend of mine really has some excellent Scotch
whisky. Come away with me. If you listen to him you will surely be
contaminated.”
Mental corruption for a young man was much worse in his opinion than
teaching him to drink Scotch whisky.
I remember walking with Lowell and my uncle when the conversation
drifted to walking sticks. My uncle said he had cut his on the grave of
Wordsworth. I sniffed and said it was not half so good a stick as mine
and that if it had been cut on the grave of Shakespeare it would have no
added value for me. Lowell turned and said:
“My boy, you are like most of the great men of the world—lacking in one
quality, that of deference—and _all_ the fools.” Considering that I had
heard of this poet in his youth, marching through the streets of
Cambridge with the young woman to whom he was betrothed, draped in
white, with wreaths upon their heads, and the people in the procession
cheering, as a tribute to virginity, I could not help but think: Is it
better, I wonder, for a young man to be lacking in deference or a sense
of humor?
Leslie Stephen was an editor, and used to get his friends to look over
some of the manuscripts submitted to him before he gave his final
opinion. One day his friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, ran in, on his way
to Scotland, to say good-by, and he asked him to take some poems by an
unknown writer along with him and give his criticism of them. R. L. S.
wrote a most enthusiastic letter, saying he was so interested that he
had hunted up the author, in the hospital, and taken along his best
beloved book, _The Viscount de Bragelonne_.
“If he did not like that, I did not want to know him,” he said, “but he
knows it better than I do. Publish his work at once.”
This was the first the world ever heard of the Hospital Sketches of
Henley, who showed his gratitude after Stevenson’s death by coming out
with a statement publicly criticizing him for his debts.
Anders Zorn and his wife, who was the daughter of a wealthy merchant of
Stockholm, came over from Spain to St. Ives. He was known principally as
a watercolorist before this, but had painted portraits of some of the
royal families of Europe, and was patronized by the king of Sweden. Zorn
had a disposition of sweetness and light, and, although he had inherited
a great charm and delicacy from the paternal side of his family, he
cared nothing for society and manners, and thought like a simple
peasant; therefore, like a child.
He was large, fattish, built on a small skeleton—a man who would break
easily—and had the head of all the colorists—that is, a square forehead,
delicate but square jaw, slight aquiline nose, and enormous pale-blue
watery eyes. His drooping yellow mustache was long but not thick, and
his hands were of the softest, most personal and interesting character.
He was a man with a great hypnotic quality who did not talk much, but
dominated without speaking. When he got into a tea fight, he would stand
around a short time, listening, then saying, “Yes, I agree,” saunter
over to the window to the light and, taking a ring off his finger, begin
to carve. He had many of these in all states of completion, and one I
recall as especially clever was of two little girls with feet twisted
and hands holding the jewel.
Zorn loved beautiful women and the human body from an artistic
standpoint. His wife understood him as no other being could, and his
unrestrained, childlike disposition and natural manners were never
misinterpreted by her. In fact, she took care of him as of a most valued
property, and added much to the success of his career as an artist. She
and his mother seemed to be the two great influences in his life. Every
year he sent a lovely sealskin wrap to his mother back in Sweden, and
the dear old woman had chests in her garret full of these coats which
she evidently delighted to take out and show to her less fortunate
friends.
I never knew Zorn to get angry; he was as smooth as cream, but always
gave his absolute opinion when asked for it, and always expected others
to do the same. Quite a contrast to a well-known American artist who
wanted to turn me out of his house because I did not praise everything
he showed me. I asked:
“What did you ask me here for, to give you compliments?”
“Yes,” he answered.
The first thing Zorn painted in oils he did out of the window of his
little stone house on the embankment overlooking the bay and island. I
helped him set his palette, and he jokingly called himself my pupil (I
had told him what materials to buy), being as peevish as a child when I
dared to criticize the fact he had put the moon in the due north.
“But don’t you think it looks well?” he said. This canvas was bought by
the French government and now hangs in the Luxembourg.
Zorn was one of those artists who are always showing much originality in
the use of their materials and combining this with a sense of humor,
which often produces fine results. I went into his back yard one day,
and he had a six-foot water color leaning against the house, and was
throwing pails of water on it—“bringing it together.” He had a great
success at the Grosvenor Gallery with a picture of boats, sails, masts,
and the seashore sand, with a fat fish-wife walking toward one. (In
those days he thought the only beautiful women were fat ones.) He laid
this on a box hedge in the garden when a thunderstorm came up. We all
rushed out and it seemed to me ruined.
“Now I can make a fine picture,” he said. He painted out the smudges
from the sails and fixed the dirty sky, but in the foreground, in the
sands, were large spots of raindrops. These he turned into footprints,
and their naturalness has been commented upon more than once.
One of the most exquisite things he ever made, and one of the greatest
works of art, considering its size and sentiment, was a little carving
of poplar wood about four by six inches in size. A feather bed, in the
center of which, as if she had been dropped there, was a tiny naked
figure, sitting up, playing with her wedding ring—the most eerie, fairy
creature, with not a touch of the salacious.
Zorn never really got over the sin of water color. He was an all around
artist, but hung next to Sargent’s his portraits had all the life taken
out of them. He did not seem to go beneath the skin except in his
etchings, which are perfect, but had a wonderful dexterity and absolute
truthfulness combined with an artistic eye that refused to see anything
ugly. He once did a portrait of a woman seated on a plush sofa, which
looked like the traditional boarding-house affair—thumbed wood, worn,
and not pleasant in color. The picture gives you an idea of a beautiful
piece of furniture. I said:
“You did not harm the sofa any, did you?”
“Mine is a copy,” he replied. He would not deny the truth, but being a
gentleman, did not call names.
It would not be fair to leave St. Ives without mentioning Mr. Knill. It
is true, he lived many years before my time, but he left a permanent
money legacy and a personality so redolent with humor that he will never
be forgotten. He was not serious, even in death, and built his tomb long
before his demise—a large crypt and granite sarcophagus with his coat of
arms—upon the top of a hill as a landmark for his smuggling fleet to get
into harbor. Having completed this, he made his will. He directed that
every five years there should be given ten pounds to the oldest widower,
ten to the oldest widow, ten to the town fiddler, and ten each to ten
young virgins, provided they all joined hands and danced around his tomb
(led by the fiddler) to the tune of “Old Hundred.”
This celebration had developed into a pathetic thing. They selected the
poor who needed the money and the dinner, which originally was to cost
two pounds a plate, but had been reduced to two shillings, even the
Cornish not being above a little unpardonable economy. The whole thing
was very English, and just like the lichen which comes on a tree when it
is old.
One of the greatest jokes Mr. Knill played upon the populace was to go
to London and die in a hospital, so that his body was dissected by the
medical students. I was telling this to a crowd of Londoners, saying
that it was such a joke that he should have painted as his motto on his
tomb:
NIL DESPERANDUM.
“Yes,” they said, “but you see his name was spelled with a ‘K.’”
London is a male, a great, gloomy being, sitting up on his island,
rough, unshaven, besmeared with cinders and smut, and glowering across
at the courtesan Paris as she graciously smiles back at him with every
wile. For Paris is a woman.
In London nobody wants to see you. There is a “get out” sign on the side
of every wall, and broken glass on the top. Even the weather frowns on
you, making you feel that you are not wanted. But in Paris, the very
first man you meet, from the cab driver to the waiter in the café, is
very glad to see you and gives you the impression that you are his
personal guest. On the north side of the Channel, the Atlantic Ocean
roars like an infuriated bull, while on the south side it hurls itself
against the coast like an angry woman. In fact, all the male
characteristics are those of London—dignity, strength, coarseness, and
brute force—but in Paris there is never a trace of these. There is only
charm.
Paris never shocks you. There is much low life and there is crime, but
it is treated in an artistic way. Every so often they have a wholesale
raid to get rid of the undesirables. At a stated time, on a summer
evening, suddenly will come marching down all the streets which lead to
the tenderloin district hundreds of police, walking four abreast and
making a dragnet which sweeps everything before it. Everyone who cannot
tell his business, any solitary woman, is caught in its meshes and
brought up before the authorities. I was sitting in the Café Américain
one night, with a drink before me, when a woman in an evening gown
rushed frantically up to my table, saying:
“You are my brother.”
Nothing loath, I took the cue, but asked, “What is it you want to do?”
“Oh, don’t you know what is happening?” she said. “It is the _cordon_.”
She took my arm and I escorted her to the door, she all the time
protesting her eternal gratitude. If she had been seized alone by the
police, that last shame would have been hers. She would have been “put
on the card” and become automatically a registered prostitute.
Nothing like this happens in London. There, in the first dusk of
evening, little girls hardly twelve years old walk past the Criterion
Bar and the Haymarket, dressed in long skirts, smirking and smiling and
proclaiming their profession to any male they happen to meet. These
children are unmolested, and no one seems to object to it in the least,
although their manner and language are disgusting as well as pitiable.
Then again there are the old women, drunken, disorderly creatures,
always ready to engage a chance loiterer in conversation and taking the
opportunity to whisper vulgar remarks in his ear; their flabby bodies
and flying wisps of coarse gray hair and the ages of vice in their
countenances almost denying their human origin. But to all of this
London is blissfully unconscious—it is merely the gross side of a
male—and, as such, is ignored.
My first visit to London was when I was still a student in Paris. I was
given one hundred dollars by a patron, evidently with the best
intentions, to go across the Channel and paint a portrait of the last of
the old-fashioned tallyho-coach drivers. I was a stranger in a strange
city; I had never felt the frosted shoulder before. Every other place I
had been, even in the north of California, I had been able to make
myself at home almost instantly, but here in the country of my
ancestors, where every man was as near to me in blood as the people of
Concord, Massachusetts, I was as much an alien as if I had been of
Oriental origin. I managed to locate the coachman and found him an
interesting character, but I could not make any arrangements about
painting him; it was impossible to do it in his house. I could not find
a studio, and before I had hardly turned around I found my pile reduced
to about thirty-five shillings. I decided it was about time to go back
to my friends.
Choosing the longest and the cheapest trip across the Channel, I found I
could just about get to St. Malo, third class, if I did not have a
stateroom. I had a right to occupy one of the berths in the downstairs
cabin, but, upon finding it filled with about eighty seasick butter
merchants, drinking and yelling, I decided to escape the vile odors and
bluff it out on deck, with my ulster to keep me warm. I have never been
sick on the water before or since, but the whole situation and my
worried state of mind drove me to it, and I shall never forget the
pathetic picture I must have made curled up in the scuppers, trampled on
by the crew, my greatcoat covering myself and a cabin boy who was making
his first trip and was also in a very bad condition. There was a
blinding snowstorm, and we lay to the leeward of the Isle of Guernsey,
making the crossing last eight hours. Upon landing, the cabin boy
recovered first and carried my grip, while I went across the gangplank
on all fours and just managed to reach a hotel and telegraph my friend
Frank Chadwick, who was down in Concarneau, to bail me out.
After such memories, I was rather loath to go back to the great capital
of my ancestors, and have never made long visits to London. But the
English are gentlemen, and, as gentlemen, have a delicate sense of
humor. _Punch_ will be stupid for six months at a time, and all of a
sudden will come out with some witty picture or saying that will ring
around the world and be remembered for years.
London is the center of the English-speaking race, and its opinion goes
for all of us; but it seemed like a foreign land to me every time I
entered, and I was glad to see that I was not alone in my feeling. I
never read the travels of Robert Louis Stevenson that I do not realize
that when he went to England he instantly felt himself among strangers.
Be that as it may, they do not treat us as they do colonials, toward
whom, if they do not ignore them, the shoulder is always hunched. They,
at least, do us the honor to scrap with us, which shows they consider us
worthy of much consideration. In all these arguments, it is best to get
in the first blow and then you are all right.
Only once do I remember feeling perfectly at home in London, and that
was the first time I visited Westminster Abbey. I must have been in a
prophetic mood or else the atmosphere of so many dead warriors
influenced my mind, for the friend who was with me wrote to me in
1917—more than thirty years later, saying:
We went to see the historical sights of London, and you were
particularly moved in Westminster Abbey. As we stood in the corridor
outside, you made a solemn prediction to this effect: “Twenty or
thirty years from now, when Germany conquers France, as she surely
will unless England has the sense to step in in time—she will then
try to conquer England. This she can do, unless America comes to the
rescue. When Americans face the destruction of Westminster Abbey,
they _will_ come to the rescue. Then at last the war of 1775 will
come to an end.”
On one occasion, while entering the city by the railway (I was feeling
fine from a reinforcement of several real old Scotch whiskies), I took
out a coin, a penny, and said:
“This is a wonderful country. I no sooner get here than for a couple of
our copper cents (with a picture of an Indian, badly done, upon the
face) I receive this large, weighty, and dignified coin of pure bronze
upon which is a bas-relief of Her Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria.”
From the other side of the compartment leaned forward a retired British
major—a man you could see had evidently conquered with difficulty his
childish habit of dropping his aitches. In a gentle, deprecating voice,
he answered:
“My dear young sir, permit me to hope that during your stay with us here
you will refrain from any desire to make a mock of our holier
institutions. Do not, I pray you, carp at Our Gracious Majesty.”
He did not get down on his belly on the floor—only mentally—but I had
the awful feeling that he was longing to do so. Queen Victoria (and that
was long before the admirable book by Lytton Strachey) could never
produce such an effect upon a sane Yankee.
Speaking of aitches, I once told Leslie Stephen that every Englishman
was careless with them, even himself. He roared and insisted that only
the lower classes dropped them or added them. I then asked him to say,
“White witch which I met on the Isle of Wight.” Of course he stumbled.
This softening of the aitch to a point where it seems to disappear is a
habit peculiar to the inbred Britisher—just as the “r” is to the
Bostonian and the “d” to the Spaniard.
I once discussed this with an educated and learned Englishman from the
commoner class. He was only a graduate of the College of London, but
knew his Latin and Greek better than any American and had been spending
his time teaching the children of the vulgar rich of Pittsburgh. He
insisted that the habit of dropping the aitches was prevalent in those
parts of England where the Romans had permanently settled—all along
inside the Wall. He cited a poem of Catullus which mocked at the
fashionable dudes of Rome for the foolish habit they had taken up of
dropping and adding their aitches. If this were the fashion in the
mother country, it would certainly have penetrated to the Roman settlers
of England.
My later attempts at an artistic invasion of London were no more
successful than my first poor effort to paint a cockney coachman. In the
year 1888 I sent two pictures to the Royal Academy which were duly
accepted and hung. Imagine my joy when a large and formidable
communication found its way to my studio in Paris, asking the price of
one of my canvases and signed by the Chantry Bequest. This was a
well-known fund created to buy pictures for the government to place in
its permanent galleries, and everyone knew that, once the price had been
asked, it amounted to the same thing as a sale. In fact, according to
the British precedent—which is generally iron-bound, a request _was_ a
sale. I replied, as they expected me to do (this was also according to
rule), that my price was four hundred pounds. The picture, which I
called “The Carpenter’s Son,” was a simple pose of one of my children in
my studio. A blond boy with a light shining over his head sat dreaming,
instead of sweeping out the shop, while his mother, in the back, told
his father what a worthless son he had begotten. The shavings had
accidentally fallen in the form of a cross, and the light seemed to be a
halo. The _Scotsman_ came out with a scathing denunciation of the work
(not at the idea, mind you) but because, as they said, I had been
sacrilegious enough to paint Christ in the costume of a French peasant
boy! Of course, the Chantry Bequest did not buy—for the first time—after
asking the price.
It was very amusing to hear that when the picture was afterward
exhibited in America, a woman of the old New England type was seen
standing before it and weeping, saying between sobs:
“Oh, what a terrible thing! They have crucified our Saviour again!”
This was more than a Concord Unitarian could understand.
The next year I took courage and sent another canvas to the Academy—this
time an inoffensive thing of an old man kissing his wife good-by—which I
called “Darby and Joan.” Through some mistake, it was marked “sold” in
the book which is left on a table to give the record of sales. Some of
my friends seeing this, and having it confirmed by the person in charge,
telegraphed me congratulations, I being away down in Cornwall. It was
customary to notify the artist as soon as a sale was consummated and, as
I heard nothing, I wrote to the secretary (whom we always called “Pants
Exclusively,” on account of his tradesman instincts) and asked him to
confirm it. He answered that one of the officials had marked the book by
mistake and that the picture was not sold. I wrote and asked him to take
it off the book and to advertise it as “still for sale.” No answer. All
through that exhibition my picture was hung and marked “sold,” thereby
preventing anyone else from buying it, and this in spite of the fact
that I wrote to protest about it three times. Then I did a terrible
thing! I issued a writ against the Royal Academy! British honor was
sullied, British institutions had been assailed. Never before had anyone
dared to invoke the law against that august and distinguished body—the
Royal Academy!
[Illustration:
“THE CARPENTER’S SON”
Hitherto unpublished photograph of the painting by Edward Simmons, now
hanging on the walls of the home of Miss Amelia Jones, New Bedford,
Massachusetts
_Copyright by Edward Simmons; from a Copley Print, Copyright by Curtis
& Cameron, Publishers, Boston_
]
My final letter ran something like this:
DEAR SIR—In my country, when dealing with gentlemen, I get an
answer. In dealing with you, I do not. I appeal to the law.
I received a most pathetic letter from “Pants Exclusively” and a large,
formidable parchment apology from the trustees of the Academy.
In the meantime the London papers burst out with indignant articles
against the person who had dared to sue the Academy, calling him all
sorts of names and saying it was a bit of “cheap American advertising.”
Immediately a flock of reporters came down to Cornwall, all ready to
start a beautiful fight. I produced my parchment apology, resulting in
the gentle fading away of newspaper representatives and a lovely article
about me in the next morning’s papers.
This carelessness of the Academy had been going on for years. I had
known of several similar cases where the artist supposed his work had
been sold and was afterwards told it was a mistake. One year a friend of
mine, with true artistic optimism, gave a large dinner party to
celebrate his good luck, and, of course, expected to settle for it with
the check he was to receive. He was months paying for that dinner. At
that he may have been lucky. He at least got his picture back. There
were many lost and never returned, and any protest from the painter only
met with indifferent silence.
The English are sentimental, though—especially where they do not
understand—and, yes, I shall have to admit it, so are we of New England.
Sitting in the drawing-room of a prominent British woman, I was
astonished to hear her say, upon the announcement that a pianist was
about to play a well-known selection of Mendelssohn: “Songs Without any
Words! What a pity!” In painting they prefer canvases that have some
literary significance; a story with a heart appeal frequently attracts
more attention than a far greater work that is more abstract.
The year after Sargent had exhibited his “El Jaleo” in the Salon, his
close friend, Ralph Curtis, was bothered to death by all the busybodies
who wanted to know what the next picture would be. One day Curtis
answered:
“I’ll tell you. Sargent is painting, for the Salon, a circle of naked
women sitting on red velvet cushions, called ‘Daughters of Sin.’”
“But he can’t send it to the Academy afterward,” they cried.
“Oh yes, he can!” replied Curtis. “He’ll just change the title to
‘Waiting for the Omnibus,’ and they will never think to look at the
painting.”
There was always a great deal of talk about Sargent’s titles. At Paris
in ’89, I was dining at Stanley Reinhart’s with a number of men when
some one spoke of the portrait painter’s Academy picture of that year.
It was a beautiful thing of girls hanging Japanese lanterns in a garden
of flowers at twilight. They said he had called it, “Carnation, lily,
lily, rose.” I said at once, “Damnation, silly, silly, pose.” They
thought it quite a joke, and some one wrote to Abbey about it, who
answered that Luke Fildes had made that remark three weeks ago. His
thought must have been almost simultaneous with mine, he in England and
I in France. This shows how people may be falsely accused of plagiarism.
Of my own pictures, there was one of an old man with two children gazing
out to sea, which I had named “Low Tide.” My mother called upon the
English tailor who bought it, as she had never happened to see it. He
was very polite and treated her with great reverence, and then proceeded
to explain her son’s work to her.
“You see, the old man has just returned from sea and the little girl has
laid her hand on his arm, telling him that his daughter and her
mother—has passed away during his absence. It is called, ‘Mother’s
Dead.’”
And this in spite of the metal plate on the frame which announced the
title in large letters! Another time, a Yankee girl—dripping with
sentiment about my poetry of mind and deep thinking—told me of the sad
picture she had seen of mine of the poor mother who, having lost her
first child, was mending its little shoe in expectation of a second. I
was puzzled until she mentioned the title, “No. 2.” In my earlier days,
I started numbering my pictures—as a musician’s “opus”—until one of the
members of my family insisted that I give it up. I had gotten as far as
1 and 2, then stopped. It was a picture of a girl in a blue calico
jacket with a darker blue skirt, mending a child’s little blue varnished
boot. Just a peasant I had seen; she was about ten or twelve, but I had
evidently made her look older. What an astonishing explanation for my
simple harmony of blues!
Frank Millet used to say, “Put a Bible on the table or a letter bordered
in black on the floor if you want to sell your picture at the Royal
Academy,” and I think this is borne out by an incident that happened to
a friend of mine in Cornwall. He was a bully fellow from a titled family
which objected to his artistic tendencies. He came to me one fall,
asking me what he should paint to send to the Academy, saying that it
was very important that he should have a picture exhibited and sold, as
his family had given him one last chance. I asked him to show me the
canvas he had sent the year before. He fetched out a thing, remarking
indifferently that it had been refused.
“Give me five minutes and some paint,” I said, “and I’ll bet you I can
fix it so that it goes in and is sold.”
“What will you bet?” he asked.
“Two guineas.”
“Done.”
It was a fairly good landscape of two tall poplars reflected in a pool
in the late afternoon. I put a dab of rose on the tops of the trees and
on their reflections, making the effect of a sunset light. Then I got a
gold panel for the frame, painting on it in most artistic Old English
lettering, these touching words:
“The last sad kiss of dear departing day.”
It went to the Academy; it was sold for two hundred pounds; I got my
ten. Of course, everybody _knew_ where the verses came from—either
Thompson’s “Seasons” or Wordsworth, etc.—and I was perfectly willing to
let the dead poets have the credit for such sentimentality.