The artist has a studio near the McVickar Theater on Madison Street.
It is the typical atelier of the Victorian Eighties: oriental drapes,
screens and pottery. Jules Guerin, then an art student and later a
contributor to _Century_, _Harper’s_ and _Scribner’s_, is clearing up
and tidying for the day.
Mr. Bromley takes you to Lyon & Healy. Yes, Mr. Lyon, or maybe it
was Mr. Healy, can start you as an apprentice. However, a young man
beginning a career should be most careful in making his selection. You
have been careful. You want to be an artist. But the business of Lyon &
Healy is musical instruments, not art.
Next morning you are introduced to Mr. Rand, or Mr. McNally. A Mr.
Martin then sends you upstairs, a couple of flights, to Mr. Robinson
in the designing and engraving department. Beginners do not receive
any pay, but you are put to work at a long table facing a row of
windows and with yards and yards of unbleached cotton-cloth stretched
on a wire at your back. You are now learning to engrave tints on
wood-blocks--under the erroneous impression that designers and
illustrators engrave their own blocks.
Mr. Bromley has found a room for you at the home of a friend, an art
dealer. It is at Vincennes Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street. You walk to
and from Rand McNally’s, located on Monroe Street, dreaming happily.
One morning, after a few weeks of getting nowhere, for you are no
master of tint-cutting, it percolates through your skull that inasmuch
as wood-engravers never seem to be doing any designing probably
designers never do any engraving.
A momentous discovery, this, for you have broken into your last
twenty-dollar gold piece--as a matter of fact there is just about
enough left to pay for taking your trunk to the depot and to buy a
second-class ticket back to that printing shop in Northern Michigan.
“Sometime, if you care to come back,” states Mr. Robinson, in a letter
which must have been written immediately after your departure, “and if
you will remain half an hour later in the evening and sweep out, and
come in a half hour earlier in the morning and dust, Rand McNally will
pay you three dollars a week.”
[Illustration]