Fragments of an Autobiography

by Felix Moscheles

"See that you get 200,000 then, or three or four; you're worth all that. Lady-love, indeed! so beautiful, I suppose! Sentiment—romance—eternal love! Eternal fudge! Remember this, Uncle Auguste's fortune was not made to encourage tomfoolery."

Now there was really no reason why Uncle Auguste should deliver himself of that speech. There was no lady-love, no classical halo, and no centime-grabbing father. But the fact was, the uncle trembled lest he should be disappointed in the boy he loved so well. He was already scheming for him, and telling one or two friends of his confidentially, that it was quite worth while treating Claude with respect, as he was the nephew of a very rich uncle. It was not to be long before the uncle was deemed well worthy of respect, as being able to boast of a very clever nephew.

Whilst he was still painting studies at the Atelier Gleyre, and attending classes and lectures at the École des Beaux Arts, Claude started a picture in a queer little studio he had taken for the purpose, at the top of a very tall house in the Rue de Seine, Quartier Latin. Somebody, with an eye to artistic possibilities, must have converted what was originally a garret into a studio by adding a big projecting window. It had a top light into which all the prying cats of the neighbourhood used to peer, whilst the less inquisitive ones merely made the loose tiles rattle as they prowled along the roof.

There was a second studio of the same kind up there, which was occupied by Giacomo Irmanno, an Italian boy of about seventeen years, with jet-black curly hair. That peculiar underglow of rich bronze colour, so characteristic of the Southern type, lit up Irmanno's perfectly chiselled features. Dupont and I made great friends with him, and I often enjoyed helping him with his work. He could be very morose and look Italian daggers, but that was probably because in his desire to become an artist he was waging war at fearful odds against poverty. He was quite out of his element under northern skies, and spoke French in a way that taught me much Italian.

His only means of support were derived from painting what is called "Les Stations de la Croix." These pictures, destined to decorate the village churches in France and generally in Catholic countries, are produced in a more matter-of-fact than artistic way. The employer with an eye to the advantages of division of labour, has the subjects printed on canvas. Then a batch of Station No. 1, perhaps some six or eight canvases at a time, are given out to artist No. 1, who puts in the landscape and surroundings; from there they go to artist No. 2, who paints the draperies, and finally to No. 3, who fills in heads, hands, and feet. Irmanno was No. 2. We placed the pictures ready for treatment all round the room. Then we started with one colour, say dark red, for the shade of a certain drapery; when that had been repeated on all the canvases, came the turn of the middle tint, and finally of the light red. Then came the next colour—I need not say they were all prescribed—and when we had made the round with that, the next, and so on until all the draperies were satisfactorily disposed of.

The proceedings were only varied when Irmanno lay down on the red brick floor and groaned, and pretended to have a sort of attack. I did not mind, because when the evil spirit was upon him, he always looked particularly interesting.

Next door, in the twin garret, Dupont was putting heart and soul into the production of his first picture; it was still in its initial stages, but studies small and large, in pencil and in chalks, were gradually covering the walls. His subject was "The raising of the daughter of Jairus," and he would never tire of talking to me about the grand opportunities it afforded to the artist. He would question me too on things connected with mesmerism (I was mesmerising in those days), and would want to know all about the first symptoms of awaking from a trance, of the action of the hand as it makes passes, and the dictates of the eye as it bids the subject sleep or wake. "Christ, the God," he wrote to me in a letter of a later date, "can never be depicted, translated into human forms, but Christ the Healer, Christ the Helper, and He, the lover of children, is perhaps approachable. Give me a lifetime, and possibly I may decipher a little of what is to be read between the lines of the New Testament."

The summer had set in early and rather savagely, as it will do sometimes in Paris, and the heat in those ex-garrets of the Rue de Seine was stifling.

Rosa Bonheur Sinel did what she could to mitigate the evil. Rosa Sinel was her real name, but somebody had nicknamed her Rosa Bonheur, and in course of time her father had worked himself into the belief that the great artist had been her godmother. She was a precocious little woman, somewhere between the age of ten and fifteen—who can tell the real age of a Parisian child? Le père Sinel was one of the best known models in Paris. He was a living écorché, a creature designed for the study of anatomy, for he had a most extraordinary faculty of showing the action of any and every muscle; in fact he could, if the circumstances required, give himself the appearance of having been skinned, scalped, or flayed alive. He was ever boasting of his participation in the great pictorial and plastic works that had made a mark in his days, and always claiming his full share of the laurels awarded to them.

"It is not so much my exceptional figure that has inspired my friends, as it is my experience that has guided them," he told us. "Did not the great Monsieur Delacroix say with his characteristic modesty, when his plafond in the Galerie d'Apollon was uncovered: 'Where should I be without the assistance of my friend Sinel?' Oui, messieurs, he was right, and such a plafond is not produced in a day. 'Art is short and sittings are long,' as the poet says; Voyez, Monsieur Ingres! Many an hour was I nailed to the cross as a thief, before we could get the true agony. I well remember his saying 'Sinel, mon ami, till I knew you, I had no idea what the flexor of a third and fourth toe could do, nor did I know what acting was till I heard you.'"