“But he can’t send it to the Academy afterward,” they cried.
“Oh yes, he can!” replied Curtis. “He’ll just change the title to ‘Waiting for the Omnibus,’ and they will never think to look at the painting.”
There was always a great deal of talk about Sargent’s titles. At Paris in ’89, I was dining at Stanley Reinhart’s with a number of men when some one spoke of the portrait painter’s Academy picture of that year. It was a beautiful thing of girls hanging Japanese lanterns in a garden of flowers at twilight. They said he had called it, “Carnation, lily, lily, rose.” I said at once, “Damnation, silly, silly, pose.” They thought it quite a joke, and some one wrote to Abbey about it, who answered that Luke Fildes had made that remark three weeks ago. His thought must have been almost simultaneous with mine, he in England and I in France. This shows how people may be falsely accused of plagiarism.
Of my own pictures, there was one of an old man with two children gazing out to sea, which I had named “Low Tide.” My mother called upon the English tailor who bought it, as she had never happened to see it. He was very polite and treated her with great reverence, and then proceeded to explain her son’s work to her.
“You see, the old man has just returned from sea and the little girl has laid her hand on his arm, telling him that his daughter and her mother—has passed away during his absence. It is called, ‘Mother’s Dead.’”
And this in spite of the metal plate on the frame which announced the title in large letters! Another time, a Yankee girl—dripping with sentiment about my poetry of mind and deep thinking—told me of the sad picture she had seen of mine of the poor mother who, having lost her first child, was mending its little shoe in expectation of a second. I was puzzled until she mentioned the title, “No. 2.” In my earlier days, I started numbering my pictures—as a musician’s “opus”—until one of the members of my family insisted that I give it up. I had gotten as far as 1 and 2, then stopped. It was a picture of a girl in a blue calico jacket with a darker blue skirt, mending a child’s little blue varnished boot. Just a peasant I had seen; she was about ten or twelve, but I had evidently made her look older. What an astonishing explanation for my simple harmony of blues!
Frank Millet used to say, “Put a Bible on the table or a letter bordered in black on the floor if you want to sell your picture at the Royal Academy,” and I think this is borne out by an incident that happened to a friend of mine in Cornwall. He was a bully fellow from a titled family which objected to his artistic tendencies. He came to me one fall, asking me what he should paint to send to the Academy, saying that it was very important that he should have a picture exhibited and sold, as his family had given him one last chance. I asked him to show me the canvas he had sent the year before. He fetched out a thing, remarking indifferently that it had been refused.
“Give me five minutes and some paint,” I said, “and I’ll bet you I can fix it so that it goes in and is sold.”
“What will you bet?” he asked.
“Two guineas.”