DOI article:
Dowie, Ménie Muriel: Wladlislaw's Advent
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21805#0108
Wladislaw’s Advent
104
with a fine vermilion point in their corners, the result, as I
insisted, of his dipping locks of hair.
With a choice of reasons for his coming, I was yet surprised
when he came, late one evening, and having whistled the opening
bars of Chopin’s “ Dirge of Poland ” below my seventh-floor
Window, decoyed me to the roadway, and described his first visit
to the Studio of Dufour in the Rue de Vaugirard.
Out of mere curiosity we had wandered to the number, one
afternoon after the reception of the letter ; and I well remembered
the living stench of the impasse, the dead trails of an enterprising
Virginia creeper, the broken mass of plaster casts which suffi-
ciently located a young sculptor near at hand, and the cracked
Moorish lamp which lay upon its side in the half-choked drain.
All we had seen of the studio’s furnishings was the silk-threaded
back of a magnificent curtain which blocked an upper square of
lights ; but I knew that inside all must be on a much greater
scale of artistic beauty than the queer, draughty barns of art-
student friends, where I often juggled with a cup of tea-—tea
produced from a corner shrouded modestly in the green canvas
covering of a French waggon and the dusty, bellying folds of a
brown fishing-net. I was now to hear from Wladislaw what the
inferior was really like ; how the great Dufour appeared when
seen from the front instead of the rear, so to say, and upon what
terms the negotiations were begun.
A certain indecisiveness in Wladislaw’s painting was reflected
in his conversation : he never could describe anything. Perhaps
this is to do him an injustice ; I would rather say that he had no
idea of giving a detailed description. By whiles you might get a
fiash equivalent to one of his illuminative brush-strokes, which
was very certain to be an unsurpassable appreciation of the fact or
the circumstances ; but bid him begin at the beginning and go
coolly
104
with a fine vermilion point in their corners, the result, as I
insisted, of his dipping locks of hair.
With a choice of reasons for his coming, I was yet surprised
when he came, late one evening, and having whistled the opening
bars of Chopin’s “ Dirge of Poland ” below my seventh-floor
Window, decoyed me to the roadway, and described his first visit
to the Studio of Dufour in the Rue de Vaugirard.
Out of mere curiosity we had wandered to the number, one
afternoon after the reception of the letter ; and I well remembered
the living stench of the impasse, the dead trails of an enterprising
Virginia creeper, the broken mass of plaster casts which suffi-
ciently located a young sculptor near at hand, and the cracked
Moorish lamp which lay upon its side in the half-choked drain.
All we had seen of the studio’s furnishings was the silk-threaded
back of a magnificent curtain which blocked an upper square of
lights ; but I knew that inside all must be on a much greater
scale of artistic beauty than the queer, draughty barns of art-
student friends, where I often juggled with a cup of tea-—tea
produced from a corner shrouded modestly in the green canvas
covering of a French waggon and the dusty, bellying folds of a
brown fishing-net. I was now to hear from Wladislaw what the
inferior was really like ; how the great Dufour appeared when
seen from the front instead of the rear, so to say, and upon what
terms the negotiations were begun.
A certain indecisiveness in Wladislaw’s painting was reflected
in his conversation : he never could describe anything. Perhaps
this is to do him an injustice ; I would rather say that he had no
idea of giving a detailed description. By whiles you might get a
fiash equivalent to one of his illuminative brush-strokes, which
was very certain to be an unsurpassable appreciation of the fact or
the circumstances ; but bid him begin at the beginning and go
coolly