Jacobs, the dealer, was busy showing some customers the paintings. The
place was softly lighted, and the paintings were shown off to the best
advantage by the arrangement of the lights. There were a number of
Oriental rugs about, helping to make the place look luxurious, and
adding somehow to the value of the paintings. Jacobs nodded to me, and I
sat down to wait.
As soon as the customers were gone, he called me over and pointing to a
couple of paintings in elaborate gold frames, he said:
“Those people who were in are furnishing their new home on Riverside
Drive, and I expect to sell them quite a few paintings. They got stuck
on those two, and I made them a price on them. Now those two are already
sold, and the party who bought them wants them delivered next week. You
have just come in time, Miss Ascough, as I must have these copied right
away. Can you get me an artist to do it?”
I looked at the paintings. They were about sixteen by twenty-eight
inches, and the subject of one à la Breton fields of wheat and
harvesters, and the other was of a priest or cardinal in his red robes,
sitting reading in a richly furnished library. Menna, I knew, could not
possibly do the work this week, for he was working on an order for
another dealer, and I had come to Jacobs to collect for old work. I
thought, however, that I could easily do it myself. So I said to Jacobs:
“I know a woman artist who’ll do it for you.”
“A woman! No, sir! I would not have a woman do any work for me,” said
the dealer. “I have had all I want to do with women artists. They do
much inferior work to the men, take twice as long, and get swelled heads
about it. They whine if they don’t make a fortune out of their daubs.
No--nothing doing with the women. Now I like Menna’s work. Take them to
him. Don’t let any one see them, and I’ll very likely be able to have
them copied again, as I think they’ll prove good sellers.”
“All right,” I said, but I made up my mind to do them myself, and I went
out with those precious “imported” paintings under my arm.
Mr. Menna was showing some of his “potboilers” to a man when I returned.
They were paintings of little ragged boys. The man did not care for
them. As he was going out he said:
“I’ll come again some day when you have other pictures. Those little boy
pictures are nice, and I like them, but they are not _parlor_ pictures,
and my customers want parlor pictures.”
Menna was puffing angrily on a big cigar. I laughed as the man went out,
but Menna could not see the humor of it. He got angrier and angrier. He
threw down his palette and brush and let out a big original curse. Wish
I could print it here.
“I hope you feel better now, Mr. Menna,” I ventured.
“That’s the kind of thing one is up against,” he roared, “and that fool,
Bonnat, was in here a while ago and told me he had refused to make some
alteration in the portrait he is painting of the wife of that rich Dr.
Craig, because the ass said he would not prostitute his art, and a lot
of stuff like that. It makes me sick. He also lost a good chance he had
to make illustrations for a magazine--best-paying magazine in New York.
He had his own damned ideas about the illustrations, and as they were
paying for the job they told him how they wanted them smoothed out.
Bonnat belongs to the new school of painting, and he actually refused to
please them--missed a chance almost any artist would be glad to get.
He’s a chump.”
I was getting excited. In a dim way I was beginning to see something
else in art than “the picture business.” It reminded me of how poor
Wallace, Ellen’s husband, used to talk of literature. I secretly admired
this Bonnat for his stand and his courage.
“Is Mr. Bonnat a Frenchman?” I asked.
“No-o.” Menna seemed uncertain of his nationality, but he said after a
moment: “He went to college in America. Got his Ph.D. at Harvard, and
was offered a professorship out West somewhere, but after studying all
those years and wasting time, he turns around and takes up art. Says all
he learned about those ’ologies will enable him to paint better. Did you
ever hear such rot?”
“I think I know what he means,” I said eagerly.
“Oh, you do, Miss Wise-one? Well, what does he, then?” Menna was
laughing at me, but I didn’t mind. I felt as if I really did understand
Bonnat’s point of view, and I said:
“I think he means that he will understand human life better. I’ve heard
artists in Boston discussing something about that, and I cannot explain
it to myself. I only _feel_ that he is right.”
“Oh, rats!” answered Menna. “It’s all very well if one can afford to do
it. I can’t, and Bonnat can’t. He went without food for a whole week,
except some bread and milk, and he’s a big, hearty animal, and he went
without his winter overcoat all last winter, because he gave it to that
little consumptive Jew, Shubert. The joke of it was that Bonnat weighs
nearly two hundred pounds, and little Shubert about seventy or ninety,
if he weighs that, and he reaches only to Bonnat’s shoulder. It was a
howling joke to see him going about in that big overcoat of Bonnat’s.”
Suddenly there flashed over me a memory of Reggie’s handsome fur-lined
coat, with its rich collar of mink, and I remembered how mine had not
been thick enough to keep the cruel cold out, and Reggie never even
noticed how I shivered with the cold in those days. My heart went out to
that big Bonnat who had given his coat to cover up a poor neighbor from
the cold.
“The name is French,” I said to Menna. “Are you sure he’s not French?”
“His folks were originally, I believe, French Huguenots, and he’s partly
German. You’re interested in him, aren’t you? Better not waste your time
on a nut,” and Menna finally dismissed Bonnat with a laugh.
When I showed him the paintings he said that I could copy them as well
as he could, and made me sit right down and go to work.
Somehow, as I copied those paintings, the pleasure was spoiled for me.
There kept running into my head thoughts about _honesty in painting_,
and again I recalled my brother-in-law’s remarks on literature, and I
knew that it must be the same with all art. I could not get my mind off
that man who would not for money be untrue to himself. I felt something
stirring within me that I had never stopped to think of before. And I
began to despise myself for the work I was doing, and I think I would
have despised Menna, too; but suddenly I thought of my father, and I
wanted to cry. I realized that there were times when we literally had to
do the very things we hated. Ideals were luxuries that few of us could
afford to have. Menna had said we had to live, and that was true enough.
Most of us were destined to wade through, not above, the miry quicksands
of life. Art then was only for the few and the rare and the fortunate.
Menna himself had had great promise as a youth. Moreover, his parents
were wealthy, and they had sent him to study in Munich. But when his
father died, there was found scarcely enough money left to support his
mother and sisters, and Menna was sent for to do his share. He was only
twenty-eight, and he tried to support himself with his brush. He was a
good-natured, careless fellow, whose path had hitherto been smoothed for
him, and so he chose the easiest way in art. He drifted into the
potboiler painting, and alas! there he stayed, as is generally the
case.