'Good heavens!' I muttered, 'when am I to hear the last of painters'
models?' Then turning to Wilderspin, I said,
'This is the model to whom you feel so deeply indebted?'
'Deeply indebted, indeed!' exclaimed he in a fervid tone, taking a
chair and playing with his hat between his knees, in his previous
fashion when beginning one of his monologues. 'When I began "Faith
and Love" I worked for weeks and months and years, having but one
thought, how to give artistic rendering to the great idea of the
Renascence of Wonder in Art symbolised in the vignette in your
father's third edition. I was very poor then; but to live upon bread
and water and paint a great picture, and know that you are being
watched by loving eyes above,--there is no joy like that. I found a
model--a fine and beautiful woman, the same magnificent blonde who
sat for so many of the Master's greatest pictures. For a long time my
work delighted me; but after awhile a suspicion, and then a sickening
dread, came upon me that all was not well with the picture. And then
the withering truth broke in upon me, the scales fell from my
eyes--the model's face was beautiful, but it was not right; the
expression I wanted was as far off as ever; there was but one right
expression in the world, and that I could not find.
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