Old lamps for new

by E. V. Lucas

There are always a few babies at the Zoo for those that think to ask for them. After I had seen Gypsy I saw a lion of tender years and he allowed me to ruffle his head and tickle his cheeks; but no such liberties are possible with the infant jaguar, which was born in January, 1911, and is anything but the harmless pat of butter that it looks. And then I held between my finger and thumb a six-weeks’ old alligator while he squirmed and raged and did everything he could to close his fret-saw jaws over me.

But none of these privileges of course made up for Delia’s death, and nothing can.

A Sale

The sale of the late Sir John Day’s pictures was particularly interesting to me, since it happens that I have the satisfaction of sharing that good judge’s predilections. His gods are for the most part mine. I, too, would choose for my walls (if I had any) Corots and Daubignys, Marises and Mauves, Millets and Bosbooms, Rousseaus and De Wints. I, too, prefer the wistful crepuscule to the vivid noon. Hence I entered Christie’s at a quarter to one on 13 May, 1909, and took the place that a boy messenger was keeping for me, with feelings of peculiar excitement and enthusiasm.

The seated company at a big sale at Christie’s is as unchanging as an ordinary congregation. A few strangers may be there, looking in for the first time, but the rest, the regular attendants, the pew-owners, so to speak, know each other, and are known to the auctioneer, so that the bids of those who engage in the contest are, as at most sales where dealers congregate, often imperceptible to others, although to him clear as speech.

We opened modestly. Lot 1 was a seascape by De Bock, and the first bid was five guineas. It little thought, that bid, what a huge total would be built upon it. The De Bock reached 160 guineas, and then made room for a Bosboom. Bosboom is a modern Dutch painter, now dead (you may see his palette in the Museum at the Hague), whose ecclesiastical interiors have a grave and sombre beauty that I suppose has never been equalled. Among collectors he is becoming more and more desired.

After the Bosbooms we came to the Corots, of which there were a round dozen, and a little anticipatory flutter was perceptible in the room. There are better Corots in the world than Sir John Day possessed; but this procession of twelve of the tender, serene canvases from the Ville d’Avray studio was very wonderful, and one lost the bidding in the quietude of the paint. Among them were three early works, when the artist liked a more rarefied air than later in life. And these one has to know in order to realize fully not only how superb Corot was, but how bewilderingly blind were the connoisseurs of that day to let him languish as they did. Of course it is easy to recognize his greatness now, when the very name Corot carries magic with it; it is difficult to put one’s self back into those times when it meant nothing, and to see the pictures with eyes unassisted by tradition; and yet I find it hard to believe that if one of these early works had come to me suddenly out of a clear sky, I should have failed to be arrested by it.

Well, there we sat, packed together like excursionists, while the giant picture-dealers of Europe fought for these pacific landscapes—these sweet lark songs among the light clouds of the grey day, to quote Corot’s own description of his ideal—until the dozen had reached a total of nearly £12,000.

To Corot succeeded his friend Charles Daubigny, whose vast and luminous “Harvest Moon” produced the instant bid of 1000 guineas, to which, after a long interval of silence, it fell. His “Bords de l’Oise,” a great wet landscape, with Daubigny’s stern, sincere beauty drenching it, brought 1800 guineas. Others followed, and then five rich scenes by Diaz, also a citizen of the white village of Barbizon, whose home you may see to-day, with a tablet on the gate, almost opposite the rambling house of Jean François Millet. The first of these Diazes was an evening picture with cattle coming down to drink beneath a stormy sky; not unlike the superb moorland scene from the same brush which Mr. Salting left to the National Gallery. It began at fifty guineas and reached 850. (By the way, the starting of safe pictures at fifty and a hundred guineas would be a pleasant task for a reduced gentleman of the Captain Jackson type, who, able no longer to collect, wished still to sun himself in the illusion of prosperity and connoisseurship. To make in a loud voice a bid of 100 or 500 guineas, whether one has such a sum in the bank or not, must do something for the spirit. It cannot leave one quite where one was.)