It was at Mrs. Mellish’s, one Sunday afternoon last spring. We were
talking over George Lillo’s portraits--a collection of them was being
shown at Durand-Ruel’s--and a pretty woman had emphatically declared:--
“Nothing on earth would induce me to sit to him!”
There was a chorus of interrogations.
“Oh, because--he makes people look so horrid; the way one looks on board
ship, or early in the morning, or when one’s hair is out of curl and one
knows it. I’d so much rather be done by Mr. Cumberton!”
Little Cumberton, the fashionable purveyor of rose-water pastels,
stroked his moustache to hide a conscious smile.
“Lillo is a genius--that we must all admit,” he said indulgently,
as though condoning a friend’s weakness; “but he has an unfortunate
temperament. He has been denied the gift--so precious to an artist--of
perceiving the ideal. He sees only the defects of his sitters; one might
almost fancy that he takes a morbid pleasure in exaggerating their weak
points, in painting them on their worst days; but I honestly believe he
can’t help himself. His peculiar limitations prevent his seeing anything
but the most prosaic side of human nature--
“‘_A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose is to him,
And it is nothing more._’”
Cumberton looked round to surprise an order in the eye of the lady whose
sentiments he had so deftly interpreted, but poetry always made her
uncomfortable, and her nomadic attention had strayed to other topics.
His glance was tripped up by Mrs. Mellish.
“Limitations? But, my dear man, it’s because he hasn’t any limitations,
because he doesn’t wear the portrait-painter’s conventional blinders,
that we’re all so afraid of being painted by him. It’s not because he
sees only one aspect of his sitters, it’s because he selects the real,
the typical one, as instinctively as a detective collars a pick-pocket
in a crowd. If there’s nothing to paint--no real person--he paints
nothing; look at the sumptuous emptiness of his portrait of Mrs. Guy
Awdrey”--(“Why,” the pretty woman perplexedly interjected, “that’s the
only nice picture he ever did!”) “If there’s one positive trait in a
negative whole he brings it out in spite of himself; if it isn’t a nice
trait, so much the worse for the sitter; it isn’t Lillo’s fault: he’s no
more to blame than a mirror. Your other painters do the surface--he does
the depths; they paint the ripples on the pond, he drags the bottom. He
makes flesh seem as fortuitous as clothes. When I look at his portraits
of fine ladies in pearls and velvet I seem to see a little naked
cowering wisp of a soul sitting beside the big splendid body, like a
poor relation in the darkest corner of an opera-box. But look at his
pictures of really great people--how great _they_ are! There’s plenty of
ideal there. Take his Professor Clyde; how clearly the man’s history is
written in those broad steady strokes of the brush: the hard work, the
endless patience, the fearless imagination of the great _savant_! Or the
picture of Mr. Domfrey--the man who has felt beauty without having the
power to create it. The very brush-work expresses the difference between
the two; the crowding of nervous tentative lines, the subtler gradations
of color, somehow convey a suggestion of dilettantism. You feel what a
delicate instrument the man is, how every sense has been tuned to the
finest responsiveness.” Mrs. Mellish paused, blushing a little at the
echo of her own eloquence. “My advice is, don’t let George Lillo paint
you if you don’t want to be found out--or to find yourself out. That’s
why I’ve never let him do _me_; I’m waiting for the day of judgment,”
she ended with a laugh.
Every one but the pretty woman, whose eyes betrayed a quivering
impatience to discuss clothes, had listened attentively to Mrs. Mellish.
Lillo’s presence in New York--he had come over from Paris for the first
time in twelve years, to arrange the exhibition of his pictures--gave to
the analysis of his methods as personal a flavor as though one had been
furtively dissecting his domestic relations. The analogy, indeed, is not
unapt; for in Lillo’s curiously detached existence it is difficult to
figure any closer tie than that which unites him to his pictures. In
this light, Mrs. Mellish’s flushed harangue seemed not unfitted to the
trivialities of the tea hour, and some one almost at once carried on
the argument by saying:--“But according to your theory--that the
significance of his work depends on the significance of the sitter--his
portrait of Vard ought to be a master-piece; and it’s his biggest
failure.”
Alonzo Vard’s suicide--he killed himself, strangely enough, the day
that Lillo’s pictures were first shown--had made his portrait the chief
feature of the exhibition. It had been painted ten or twelve years
earlier, when the terrible “Boss” was at the height of his power; and if
ever man presented a type to stimulate such insight as Lillo’s, that man
was Vard; yet the portrait was a failure. It was magnificently composed;
the technique was dazzling; but the face had been--well, expurgated.
It was Vard as Cumberton might have painted him--a common man trying
to look at ease in a good coat. The picture had never before been
exhibited, and there was a general outcry of disappointment. It wasn’t
only the critics and the artists who grumbled. Even the big public,
which had gaped and shuddered at Vard, revelling in his genial villany,
and enjoying in his death that succumbing to divine wrath which, as a
spectacle, is next best to its successful defiance--even the public felt
itself defrauded. What had the painter done with their hero? Where
was the big sneering domineering face that figured so convincingly in
political cartoons and patent-medicine advertisements, on cigar-boxes
and electioneering posters? They had admired the man for looking his
part so boldly; for showing the undisguised blackguard in every line of
his coarse body and cruel face; the pseudo-gentleman of Lillo’s picture
was a poor thing compared to the real Vard. It had been vaguely expected
that the great boss’s portrait would have the zest of an incriminating
document, the scandalous attraction of secret memoirs; and instead, it
was as insipid as an obituary. It was as though the artist had been in
league with his sitter, had pledged himself to oppose to the lust for
post-mortem “revelations” an impassable blank wall of negation. The
public was resentful, the critics were aggrieved. Even Mrs. Mellish had
to lay down her arms.
“Yes, the portrait of Vard _is_ a failure,” she admitted, “and I’ve
never known why. If he’d been an obscure elusive type of villain, one
could understand Lillo’s missing the mark for once; but with that face
from the pit--!”
She turned at the announcement of a name which our discussion had
drowned, and found herself shaking hands with Lillo.
The pretty woman started and put her hands to her curls; Cumberton
dropped a condescending eyelid (he never classed himself by recognizing
degrees in the profession), and Mrs. Mellish, cheerfully aware that she
had been overheard, said, as she made room for Lillo--
“I wish you’d explain it.”
Lillo smoothed his beard and waited for a cup of tea. Then, “Would there
be any failures,” he said, “if one could explain them?”
“Ah, in some cases I can imagine it’s impossible to seize the type--or
to say why one has missed it. Some people are like daguerreotypes; in
certain lights one can’t see them at all. But surely Vard was obvious
enough. What I want to know is, what became of him? What did you do with
him? How did you manage to shuffle him out of sight?”
“It was much easier than you think. I simply missed an opportunity--”
“That a sign-painter would have seen!”
“Very likely. In fighting shy of the obvious one may miss the
significant--”
“--And when I got back from Paris,” the pretty woman was heard to wail,
“I found all the women here were wearing the very models I’d brought
home with me!”
Mrs. Mellish, as became a vigilant hostess, got up and shuffled her
guests; and the question of Yard’s portrait was dropped.
I left the house with Lillo; and on the way down Fifth Avenue, after one
of his long silences, he suddenly asked:
“Is that what is generally said of my picture of Vard? I don’t mean in
the newspapers, but by the fellows who know?”