A Kensington Museum student would have drawn that flower carefully
with a lead pencil; it would be washed with colour and stippled until
it reached the quality of wool, which is so much admired in that art
training-school; and whenever the young lady was not satisfied with
the turn her work was taking, she would wash the displeasing portion
out and start afresh. The difference--there are other differences
--but the difference we are concerned with between this hypothetical
young person of Kensington education and Mr. James, is that the
drawing which Mr. James exhibits is not a faithful record of all the
difficulties that are met with in painting an orchid. A hundred
orchids preceded the orchid on the wall--some were good in colour and
failed in drawing, and _vice versâ_. Others were excellent in drawing
and colour, but the backgrounds did not come out right. All these were
destroyed. That mauve and grey orchid was probably not even sketched
in with a lead pencil. Mr. James desired an uninterrupted expression
of its beauty: to first sketch it with a pencil would be to lose
something of his first vividness of impression. It must flow straight
out of the brush. But to attain such fluency it was necessary to paint
that orchid a hundred times before its form and colour were learnt
sufficiently to admit of the expression of all the flower's beauty in
one painting. It is not that Mr. James has laboured less but ten times
more than the Kensington student. But all the preliminary labour
having been discarded, it seems as simple and as slight a thing as may
be--a flower in a glass, the flower drawn only in its essentials, the
glass faintly indicated, a flowing tint of mauve dissolving to grey,
the red heart of the flower for the centre of interest. A decoration
for where? I imagine it in a boudoir whose walls are stretched and
whose windows are curtained with grey silk. From the ceiling hangs a
chandelier, cut glass--pure Louis XV. The furniture that I see is
modern; but here and there a _tabouret_, a _guéridon_, or a delicate
_étagère_, filled with tiny volumes of Musset and two or three rare
modern writers, recall the eighteenth century. And who sits in this
delicate boudoir perfumed with a faint scent, a sachet-scented
pocket-handkerchief? Surely one of Sargent's ladies. Perhaps the lady
in the shot-silk dress who sat on an eighteenth-century French sofa
two years ago in the Academy, her tiny, plump, curved white hand,
drawn as well in its interior as in exterior limits, hanging over the
gilt arm of the sofa. But she sits now, in the boudoir I have
imagined, in a low arm-chair covered with grey silk; her feet lie one
over the other on the long-haired rug; the fire burns low in the
grate, and the soft spring sunlight laps through the lace curtains,
filling the room with a bland, moody, retrospective atmosphere. She
sits facing Mr. James's water-colour. She is looking at it, she does
not see it; her thoughts are far away, and their importance is slight.