After that devastating influenza of March, his seldom-needed doctor had ordered a few weeks’ complete rest. “Complete piffle,” Price had growled. Nevertheless, when his friend James Anthony, a painter given to unexpected withdrawals and fresh beginnings in art, had offered him an opportunity for an entire change of scene, he had accepted. Anthony, always as keen as any Vibert or Abendroth in his pursuit of the secrets of the old masters, had suddenly decided to go abroad to study certain gums and resins that might eventually preserve our American painting from destruction. Anthony was like that. He was successful enough and wealthy enough to be as whimsically conscientious as he pleased about pigments and surfaces. He could afford to keep a bee in his hat, and call it altruism. And now, the bee having stung him afresh, that wonderful hill studio of his was at Maurice’s disposal.
“You will be doing me a favor,” wrote Jimmy Anthony, “if you’ll take it, even for this one summer. There are two sculptors hounding me to rent it to them, a man and a woman. The man I can beat off, but the woman will work her will and get the place and wreck it for me, if you don’t come to the rescue. I can stand a painter’s rubbish, but sculptors! No, no, not for Jimmy. And please use up whatever you find in the line of materials. There’s nothing there of any further interest to me. You might like all that garance rose doré, and that pomegranate cadmium I used to swear by. And those mahogany panels that I had especially made. Do use them. Good on both sides, and bully for landscapes.”
When Price, after a look of delight at the spring magic framed by the doorway, had turned to examine his new quarters, he was not surprised that Anthony had shunned sculptors as tenants. He could not imagine the litter of clay and plaster, wet rags and greasy plastiline, defiling that spacious immaculate hall and its dependencies, all contrived by his friend out of a hay-barn and stable used by the roadhouse gentry of a hundred years ago. Boxstalls made excellent dressing-rooms for models. Harness-closets gave ample space for easels and canvases, frames and colors. The north light was vast, but could be curtained at any point. The great door of the former hayloft was a proscenium arch through which one could look east, south, and west, upon various enchanted worlds. Again and again, that southern picture called aloud to Price to be painted. He found himself saying, “I will!” with the exultation of a man about to be married for the first time.
His own materials had not yet arrived; his wife, a doctor-abiding person, had seen to that; she too had picked up that annoying slogan, a complete rest! Perhaps Anthony’s closets would give first aid. Yes, there were plenty of brushes and colors, all in good condition; easels great and small; and such a panoply of varnishes and mediums as Price himself had never dreamed of needing. No wonder Anthony’s painting ran rather hectic, at times; he had too much stuff to paint with, yes, too much by far. His canvases were overdressed, by Jove! Pluming himself a bit on his own very simple palette, which he naturally regarded as an evidence of a higher culture than Anthony’s (just as the Doric lay in literature is finer than the Corinthian ode, he told himself), Maurice picked out from a bewildering variety the ten colors of his heart’s desire, including the garance rose. He looked indulgently, but not self-indulgently, on the pomegranate cadmium, as on a pretty lady he had no wish to flirt with.
Still searching, he laughed outright to find on an upper shelf the selfsame palette that Anthony had so often bragged about, at the Club, and (to judge from its pristine appearance) had so seldom used, in the studio. It was a rather large palette, acquired at no small cost by Anthony, during his period of trying out dear Shorty Lasar’s theory, namely: that when seen on the dull brownish wood of the ordinary palette, any color, no matter how muddy, looks bright and pure, luring the painter to his ruin; whereas, when shown on a brilliant, untarnished surface, say that of pearl or of ivory, the same color is revealed at once in all its foulness. “Nothing like mother-of-pearl,” Jimmy would say, “for exposing the true soul of a gob of paint!” And Anthony’s Club-famous palette, which Maurice now held in his hand, had been inlaid with pearl from stem to stern, a splendor which had added somewhat to its weight. Price balanced it between thumb and fingers, a little patronizingly, perhaps, as may well happen when a man takes up another’s palette, especially a palette more famed in theory than in practice. Not that he wanted to quarrel with the tools he was lucky enough to find; anything in reason would do.
As for the mahogany panels, he would gratefully use one of those, at a pinch. It had not the kind of surface he preferred, his way being to use a rather absorbent canvas, preparing the surface to suit the needs of the work in hand. But here again, Maurice was not hide-bound. Surface wasn’t the only thing; it would be a poor painter who would let a marvel-landscape like that go unpainted, merely because he hadn’t a fine new roll of canvas to slash into. He was glad to find, in that inexhaustible closet, half a dozen of those panels; baywood or cherry, perhaps, though his friend always called them mahogany. Running eager fingers over them, he found that the one he liked best for size and solidity, for shape and texture, had already been used, on one side; but that mattered not at all. He knew Anthony’s three-layered panels; both sides were good.
On bringing the panel of his choice out into the full light, he was first dazzled and then puzzled by the painting on it. Was this really Anthony’s work? Theory-ridden as he was, Anthony had certainly painted queer stuff, at times. But Maurice could not insult his friend’s hospitality by taking this weird performance in earnest. Its style out-Jimmied Jimmy. Yet it seemed brilliantly familiar; it had Anthony mannerisms.
Then memory suddenly turned her flashlight on the thing, and told him why it seemed familiar. Three years before, on the eve of sailing for the Front, he had visited Anthony, and the two had inspired the boys and girls of the artist colony to organize a “Faker Show” for the benefit of the French wounded; children, models, and even the artists themselves had vied with each other in producing caricatured art. The most wildly acclaimed piece had been this very panel, painted in a joyous hour by Anthony’s studio-boy, Pietro, from Anthony’s model, Amouretta McGowan; to save time, he had used one of his master’s discarded portrait-studies, and he had kept the characteristic Anthony composition throughout.
It was meant for a portrait, one saw,—the portrait of a woman, a hussy, if you like, with dusky flesh-tints after Gauguin, and with an impudent gown patterned and colored like that in Matisse’s once celebrated “Madras Rouge.” But the pearls with which the minx was crowned and girdled, draped and festooned,—ah, the pearls were surely a fling at Maurice Price himself, “the Price-of-Great-Pearls,” as the League students called him, just as in other days they had called Kenyon Cox, “Bunion Socks,” George de Forest Brush, “Young-Man-Afraid-of-his-Brushes,” and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, “Gaudy Saint August”; youthful pleasantries which harmed no one, least of all the artists themselves.