The Amouretta landscape, and other stories

If you search from Greenwich Village to Lawrence Park, and then from Turtle Bay to Chelsea, you will not find in all New York a painter less spoiled by fame than Maurice Price. It was in his nature to know from the very first that the luckier you are, the kinder you can be. I do not regard it as a limitation that in what he does and in what he wears he scarcely satisfies the romantic ideal about artists and their ways. There is nothing wild in his attire, and he does not live more dangerously than other citizens must. Still, there is something about his type of good looks that sets him apart and gives him away. Those who see him for the first time, in profile, whether at the Follies or at a funeral of an Academician, sometimes think that if they knew the man, they would esteem him more than they would love him. That is because they have not yet met him in front view, and discovered the eager friendliness in his gray eyes, the sensitive, listening expression of his whole face; the look that says, “Tell me your joke in life, and I’ll tell mine.” His merry young wife had once declared that there were only two things that saved his head from an intolerable Greek goddishness. Maurice’s curiosity was roused, but the girl had kept him guessing until the end of the week, when she explained that one of the things was his right ear, the other, his left; both of them stuck out more than the classic law allowed; just as well, too; since, for her part, she had preferred to marry a man, not an archangel or a Greek coin. The man smiled, and kept on painting.

A time came when Maurice Price, suddenly finding himself in a new environment, remembered that in ten years he had not once painted a landscape from nature. As he stood in the wide doorway of his friend’s country studio, and gazed with delight at the springtime beauty of the New Hampshire hills flung down at his feet, the fact that during a whole decade his painting had been done within doors and under glass struck him as an absurdity, even a reproach. Ah, well, those who go about calling ten years a whole decade must expect reproach, he reasoned. They bring it on themselves.

Besides, the situation was explicable enough. Ever since he and his wife had said good-bye to their cottage near Fontainebleau, exchanging the joys of study in France for the responsibilities of family life in their own land, his work had been chiefly portraits, with an occasional welcome mural decoration to break the monotony of rosy lips, shimmering pearls, crisp satins; of academic robes, frock coats, tennis trousers, and whatever else a modern portrait-painter must cope valiantly with, on canvas. Not that Maurice was weary of his good fortune in having portraits to do. He often said, with that frank yet pensive smile of his, that every sitter on earth has some personal quality which, if seen aright, can alleviate if not actually elevate our art. Hence, after every excursion into the field of mural decoration, he returned with new zest to his girls with pearls, his dowagers, his bankers; while after every surfeit of our common humanity as shown up in a north light, he seized with ardor the chance to depict on the walls of some library or court-house those various fables of antiquity which seem to shed the most pleasing light on the fables of our modern civilization. But never a landscape!

Naturally, his decorations and even his portraits often had landscape backgrounds. Fancy our Agriculture without her wheatfields, or our Mining Industry without her tumbled hills, or a Bridal at Glen Cove without blue skies, lovely leafage, a beauty-haunted marble vase, a teasing vista where Pan might lurk unseen! But very properly, such backgrounds as these were merely arrangements, or, as one might say, apt quotations from nature; they did not pretend to report passionate personal interviews with her. Maurice Price loved to paint such backgrounds. Whether in a tranquil or a stormy mood, he always kept the hope of distilling beauty for the ages. And he knew that the backgrounds had their part in that enterprise of his.

In his golden twenties, he had been a singularly diligent lover and student of landscape. Many an elder painter might have envied him his portfolios stuffed with first-hand information and first-hand illusion concerning rocks and seas, skies and fields, trees and hills, and all the rainbow hues and lights and darks that visited them in their repose, their shifting moods, their crises. Maurice in the late thirties often stood in awe of that far-off Maurice of the early twenties, who seemed to know so much even then of the painter’s magic book of all outdoors. To-day, he wondered whether he could beat his younger self in the game that is played on canvas with brushes, under the sky, with everything more or less astir, and nothing at all ever quite the same as it was a moment before, least of all in its colors and values.

After that devastating influenza of March, his seldom-needed doctor had ordered a few weeks’ complete rest. “Complete piffle,” Price had growled. Nevertheless, when his friend James Anthony, a painter given to unexpected withdrawals and fresh beginnings in art, had offered him an opportunity for an entire change of scene, he had accepted. Anthony, always as keen as any Vibert or Abendroth in his pursuit of the secrets of the old masters, had suddenly decided to go abroad to study certain gums and resins that might eventually preserve our American painting from destruction. Anthony was like that. He was successful enough and wealthy enough to be as whimsically conscientious as he pleased about pigments and surfaces. He could afford to keep a bee in his hat, and call it altruism. And now, the bee having stung him afresh, that wonderful hill studio of his was at Maurice’s disposal.

“You will be doing me a favor,” wrote Jimmy Anthony, “if you’ll take it, even for this one summer. There are two sculptors hounding me to rent it to them, a man and a woman. The man I can beat off, but the woman will work her will and get the place and wreck it for me, if you don’t come to the rescue. I can stand a painter’s rubbish, but sculptors! No, no, not for Jimmy. And please use up whatever you find in the line of materials. There’s nothing there of any further interest to me. You might like all that garance rose doré, and that pomegranate cadmium I used to swear by. And those mahogany panels that I had especially made. Do use them. Good on both sides, and bully for landscapes.”

When Price, after a look of delight at the spring magic framed by the doorway, had turned to examine his new quarters, he was not surprised that Anthony had shunned sculptors as tenants. He could not imagine the litter of clay and plaster, wet rags and greasy plastiline, defiling that spacious immaculate hall and its dependencies, all contrived by his friend out of a hay-barn and stable used by the roadhouse gentry of a hundred years ago. Boxstalls made excellent dressing-rooms for models. Harness-closets gave ample space for easels and canvases, frames and colors. The north light was vast, but could be curtained at any point. The great door of the former hayloft was a proscenium arch through which one could look east, south, and west, upon various enchanted worlds. Again and again, that southern picture called aloud to Price to be painted. He found himself saying, “I will!” with the exultation of a man about to be married for the first time.

His own materials had not yet arrived; his wife, a doctor-abiding person, had seen to that; she too had picked up that annoying slogan, a complete rest! Perhaps Anthony’s closets would give first aid. Yes, there were plenty of brushes and colors, all in good condition; easels great and small; and such a panoply of varnishes and mediums as Price himself had never dreamed of needing. No wonder Anthony’s painting ran rather hectic, at times; he had too much stuff to paint with, yes, too much by far. His canvases were overdressed, by Jove! Pluming himself a bit on his own very simple palette, which he naturally regarded as an evidence of a higher culture than Anthony’s (just as the Doric lay in literature is finer than the Corinthian ode, he told himself), Maurice picked out from a bewildering variety the ten colors of his heart’s desire, including the garance rose. He looked indulgently, but not self-indulgently, on the pomegranate cadmium, as on a pretty lady he had no wish to flirt with.

Still searching, he laughed outright to find on an upper shelf the selfsame palette that Anthony had so often bragged about, at the Club, and (to judge from its pristine appearance) had so seldom used, in the studio. It was a rather large palette, acquired at no small cost by Anthony, during his period of trying out dear Shorty Lasar’s theory, namely: that when seen on the dull brownish wood of the ordinary palette, any color, no matter how muddy, looks bright and pure, luring the painter to his ruin; whereas, when shown on a brilliant, untarnished surface, say that of pearl or of ivory, the same color is revealed at once in all its foulness. “Nothing like mother-of-pearl,” Jimmy would say, “for exposing the true soul of a gob of paint!” And Anthony’s Club-famous palette, which Maurice now held in his hand, had been inlaid with pearl from stem to stern, a splendor which had added somewhat to its weight. Price balanced it between thumb and fingers, a little patronizingly, perhaps, as may well happen when a man takes up another’s palette, especially a palette more famed in theory than in practice. Not that he wanted to quarrel with the tools he was lucky enough to find; anything in reason would do.

As for the mahogany panels, he would gratefully use one of those, at a pinch. It had not the kind of surface he preferred, his way being to use a rather absorbent canvas, preparing the surface to suit the needs of the work in hand. But here again, Maurice was not hide-bound. Surface wasn’t the only thing; it would be a poor painter who would let a marvel-landscape like that go unpainted, merely because he hadn’t a fine new roll of canvas to slash into. He was glad to find, in that inexhaustible closet, half a dozen of those panels; baywood or cherry, perhaps, though his friend always called them mahogany. Running eager fingers over them, he found that the one he liked best for size and solidity, for shape and texture, had already been used, on one side; but that mattered not at all. He knew Anthony’s three-layered panels; both sides were good.

On bringing the panel of his choice out into the full light, he was first dazzled and then puzzled by the painting on it. Was this really Anthony’s work? Theory-ridden as he was, Anthony had certainly painted queer stuff, at times. But Maurice could not insult his friend’s hospitality by taking this weird performance in earnest. Its style out-Jimmied Jimmy. Yet it seemed brilliantly familiar; it had Anthony mannerisms.

Then memory suddenly turned her flashlight on the thing, and told him why it seemed familiar. Three years before, on the eve of sailing for the Front, he had visited Anthony, and the two had inspired the boys and girls of the artist colony to organize a “Faker Show” for the benefit of the French wounded; children, models, and even the artists themselves had vied with each other in producing caricatured art. The most wildly acclaimed piece had been this very panel, painted in a joyous hour by Anthony’s studio-boy, Pietro, from Anthony’s model, Amouretta McGowan; to save time, he had used one of his master’s discarded portrait-studies, and he had kept the characteristic Anthony composition throughout.