THE AMOURETTA LANDSCAPE
I
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.