Raw Material

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

The whole expensive show was perched on the branch of other people’s opinions, and was ready to fall to the ground as soon as that branch waved in the wind of a new fashion. There was not one object which suggested what you might think would be the first, simple, hearty, healthy instinct of prospering humanity, the desire to surround itself with what it likes. No, in its abject consistency, the room shamelessly proclaimed that its ambition was to be well thought of by “people in the know” and not at all to please the family who had paid for it and had to live with it.

Docility in human beings is always a dreadful quality, but docility in matters of taste is shameful. I sighed, and fixed my eyes on what looked like a Chardin. Oh, yes, Chardin was “in” now, I remembered. But an ordinary private family would be as little likely to own a real Chardin as a real Veermeer. I reflected that as soon as it was discovered not to be a genuine one, it would certainly be sent off to the junk shop. And yet it was a delightful canvas, apparently by some one of the period who had absorbed Chardin’s atmosphere and loved it as we do. If it looked so much like a Chardin that only the X-ray could tell the difference, why wasn’t it as good as a Chardin? I fell into a meditation on the hideous ways of collectors of pictures, blasphemers against the Holy Ghost of Art that they are. Ostensibly they buy pictures because they love good paintings (I am not referring to art dealers!). A collector sees a small canvas, said to be a Teniers, and is ready to pay a fantastic price for it, enough to endow a school for all time. Some expert with a chemical test proves that it is not a Teniers. It is the same picture as before, the very same; but now the lover of good art would not hang it on his walls, if it were given to him.

What kind of a race is that to belong to, I asked myself plaintively. They don’t want beauty, they don’t want art, they haven’t even the plain courage that any dog or monkey has, to want what they want. They want what other people pretend to want.

I got up restlessly, crossed over to the other side of the room, turned my eyes to the side I had left, and was electrified. There in the center of the wall, next to a small reproduction of a Madhu camel-fight, was a large canvas, a solidly painted, honest, dark, sentimental Jules Breton. I gazed at it with profound thankfulness. There was not an extenuating circumstance. It was his usual peasant girl, done with his usual pseudo-realism, with her usual bare feet, every muddy toe conscientiously drawn, and it had darkened to the usual Breton gloom. It swore at the top of its voice at all the knowing, Orientalized, simplified, subtle things about it, and my heart leaped up to hear it swear. For it sounded like a living voice.

Here was something that must have been bought some time ago (for nobody can actually have bought a Breton recently), which must have been hung on the wall when Bretons were in style. But it had not been banished when the style had changed!

And yet the rest of the room told me unmistakably that the owner of that room knew as well as any one else what was now thought of that Breton by people “in the know.”

Well, there was one visitor who appreciated it. Never before had I thought to admire so ardently the dull, faithful, unimaginative surface of a Breton. But I gazed at it with affection. There could be no reason for its presence except that somebody liked it enough to keep it in spite of what other people thought. Well, now—I took heart—maybe the situation wasn’t so desperate as I had thought. Perhaps we may have a live national taste in art, twenty or more generations later on. If there was anybody not an artist himself, who had the honesty and courage which must be at the foundation of anything alive in artistic taste, why perhaps....

Just then a dreadful possibility came into my mind—perhaps it had been a wedding present from a wealthy uncle not to be offended?

On this my host and hostess came in. As we talked of the object of my visit (which had nothing to do with art) I was constantly spying on the expression of their eyes, listening half-hopefully, half-despairingly to the sound of their voices, watching feverishly every turn of expression in their kind, honest faces. I had never seen them before that day and probably shall have no occasion to see them again. But I often think of them and wonder about them. They really looked as though they might be capable of not being ashamed to like a picture no longer in fashion. Perhaps they had kept that Breton on their walls out of sheer, honest, brave, artistic integrity....