ART AND ARTISTS
HENRY—"He may be a great artist, but he has a peculiar way of doing things."
HAPPY—"How's that?"
HENRY—"He says he painted his greatest masterpiece on an empty stomach."
Impressionistic
Whistler once undertook to get a fellow artist's work into the autumn salon. He succeeded, and the picture was hung. But the painter, going to see his masterpiece with Whistler on varnishing day, uttered an exclamation of dismay.
"Good Heavens!" he cried, "you're exhibiting my picture upside down."
"Hush!" said Whistler. "The committee refused it the other way."
"If you do good work, your work will grow after you are gone."
"That's a fact. Rubens left only some 2,000 pictures, but there are 10,000 of his pictures in circulation now."
"Luxurious tastes Richleigh has. He has a Corot in his office."
"That's nothing! I have a whistler in mine."
Two ladies, each with her child, visited the Chicago Art Museum. As they passed the "Winged Victory" the little boy exclaimed: "Huh! She ain't got no head." "Sh!" the horrified little girl replied, "That's art; she don't need none!"
One of those country gentlemen who owns a farm in Brown County, but lives in Indianapolis and only spends his weekends on the farm, asked one of his neighbors down in Brown county: "Did you know that T. C. Steele sold the picture that he painted on your farm?" The farmer made no reply to this, and then the country gentleman told him the price Mr. Steele got for the canvas. "I just wish I had known the feller liked the place well enough to pay that for a picture of it," the farmer said. "I'd a' sold him the farm for $200 less than that."
ARTIST—"Now, here's a picture—one of my best, too—I've just finished. When I started out I had no idea what it was going to be."
FRIEND—"After you got through, how did you find out what it was?"
Bessie is a bright one. The other day her teacher set her and her schoolmates to drawing, letting them choose their own subjects. After the teacher had examined what the other children had drawn, she took up Bessie's sheet.
"Why, what's this?" she said. "You haven't drawn anything at all, child."
"Please, teacher, yes, I have," returned Bessie. "It's a war-picture-a long line of ammunition-wagons at the front. You can't see 'em 'cause they're camouflaged."
"Mark Twain was visiting H.H. Rogers," said a New York editor. "Mr. Rogers led the humorist into his library.
"'There,' he said as he pointed to a bust of white marble. 'What do you think of that?' It was a bust of a young woman coiling her hair-a graceful example of Italian sculpture. Mr. Clemens looked and then he said:
"'It isn't true to nature."
"'Why not?' Mr. Rogers asked.
"'She ought to have her mouth full of hairpins,' said the humorist."
See also Futurist art.