JOE.”
CHAPTER VI
BOOKS AND TRAVEL
Of work in volume form my husband left comparatively little, and all the books of his earlier years were on Art. His criticisms on the various exhibitions of Old Masters at Burlington House, chiefly written at that time for the Pall Mall Gazette and the Art Journal, were useful to him in a volume on The Drawings of the Old Masters in the British Museum, upon which subject he was a careful and enthusiastic student; and at a somewhat later period—when he and Mr. C. E. Hallé organized the famous exhibitions of those drawings at the Grosvenor Gallery—a recognised connoisseur.
It is interesting to note that much of the matter written in those early years upon a subject on which he was always a master was echoed involuntarily in my husband’s swan-song upon the same subject, i.e. The Ideals of Painting, posthumously published in 1917; for although he naturally acquired a deeper knowledge of individual pictures as the years went on, bringing him opportunities of visiting the great collections of Europe, he very rarely changed his opinion of the characteristics of each painter; and his loving appreciation of the subtlest qualities in his favourites was such that I remember a gifted connoisseur saying to him once respecting a fellow art critic: “So-and-so could tell you whether a picture was authentic or not with his back to it, provided he had got its pedigree at his fingers ends; but you don’t depend on books; you know the man and his method and study the painter in the light of them, and if your verdict is sometimes at variance with the alleged pedigree, by Jove, you’re generally right.”
So thoroughly had he steeped himself in the subject that when we went on our belated honeymoon to the towns of Northern Italy, he always knew exactly where every picture was that he wanted to see, and many is the argument that I had in those less enlightened days with Italian officials as to the existence of some particular work of Art which they little knew was under their care, and many lovely things we found in private places which, perhaps even now, are missed by the ordinary tourist.
I recollect the weary trip he made from Milan that he might study the wonderful Luini frescoes at Saronno. Now the little town is on a railway, but in those days it was only reached in a horse-omnibus, slowly jogging, as only the poor starved Italian horses of that day could jog, across the sun-baked Lombard plains. The beautiful lunar frescoes, some of them in sepia, in the sacristy of the Church of San Maurizio Maggiore at Milan, were among the things which we should never have seen if he had not made me insist on the sacristan opening that closed door that he might examine for himself. And a really funny incident occurred at Mantova—a town lying off the regular route, but so picturesque, with its lovely Palazzo del Të raised on arcades built into the marshes—that it is strange it should not be oftener visited by the tourist.
We lodged in a vast but dirty old Inn, waited on by a girl whose beauty compensated, in Joe’s eyes only, for slipshod methods; nothing but my knowledge of the tongue would have procured us even the comfort of a huge warming-pan with which I endeavoured to dry the damp sheets. After a sleepless night and a tiring morning in the Castle looking at the Mantegna portraits of grim Gonzagas and stooping to enter the “dwarf’s apartments,” whence slits of windows peer upon the eerie marshland, I was in no mood for an altercation. Yet an altercation was the only means by which I finally succeeded in inducing the morose custodian of a dark church in the town to do Joe’s will: he had come to Mantova to see examples of Mantegna for some work that he was doing and he was not going away without having unearthed this specially interesting one. He led the way himself to the side-chapel where he believed the painting to be, but lo! a hideous modern daub hung over the little altar and his face fell. Then he had an inspiration: in spite of the man’s remonstrances he went up the steps and peered behind the gaudy painting.