Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1907 (Heft 17))

is blurred, as, too, is that of the great salon which was full of gold furniture.
Presently, however, as we waited, the boy’s hand snugly in the rector's, the
curtains over a doorway parted, and two tall men, more beautifully dressed
than the grandest soldiers I had ever seen, stepped through. Each held a
gilded sconce, brilliant with lighted candles ; and the one stepped to the right
a pace and the other to the left; then they drew apart the curtains, announc-
ing in a deep voice, “Her Ladyship.”
Yes, it was the Great Lady herself; a tall figure in a mossy green velvet
gown that descended from the waist in volumes of heavy folds. Above her
waist were bulging sleeves and a deep-cut bodice, that allowed more to be
seen than to be conjectured. And it was all very white, while her cheeks
were crimson, and her eyes large and very black, and her hair a mass of red-
dish gold. And as she stood there beneath the canopy of cloth-of-gold
curtains, lighted by the glare of the candles held by the two grand men,
she looked like some old pictures that I had seen, very wonderful and
very ugly.
And indeed she was a painted lady—this and more about her I have
heard since—and very ugly, with that terrible kind of ugliness that comes of
an old woman’sattempt to look young. She had been a noted beauty;
artists had coupled her name with the creations of Paul Veronese, and rumor
mixed her honor with somebody else than her husband. She had been a femme
galante—but that was fifty years ago. Now she was a devote, and her mind,fixed
on eternity, had lost count of the flight of time. Decrepit as she was, she
fancied herself in the full glow of her mature attractions, and that evening, as
on other Sunday evenings, she displayed them for the edification of the rector
partly, but mostly of herself. It was a dreary meal, despite the gold plate
on the table and sideboard. The lights were arranged to set off her person,
as she sat with the rector on one side and me on the other, the rest of the long
table vanishing into gloom, while the desolation of the huge room was
relieved only by the spectral forms of six silent serving-men. The rector
exhausted his gifts of talk; she was mute, a decked corpse at her own
Egyptian feast.
Crazy? Who knows? For my own part I was too young then to
analyze causes, and to-day I only recollect her as a worn, sapless woman,
masquerading in the memory of her past.
But why should Herzog's prints have awakened this reminiscence? If
you are familiar with them, you will recall that his motive is to create com-
positions of ideal beauty that shall appeal to the imagination through the
decorative arrangement of line, masses, and chiaroscuro, and through senti-
ment of expression in the faces, poses, and gestures. Generally the appeal
of these pictures is purely abstract; sometimes, however, it includes an
allegorical or literary significance. His method of composition is based
upon the principles brought to perfection by the great Italians—a balanced
distribution of nicely calculated repetitions and contrasts. They derived it
from the study of antique sculpture, influenced also, one may suspect, by the
example of architecture. For, as in the case of the latter, it is a composition
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