“When my father persuaded me to send a bold sketch to the Volney Club, which I had done to please myself, and which they hung and bought. So I said to myself: 'Why trim, clean up, and make pretty a picture, when by simply painting what I love in nature in a free, breezy manner while my enthusiasm lasts—and it generally lasts until I get through;—sometimes it spills over to the next day—I please myself and a lot of people beside.”
We were all on our feet now examining the sketches—all running-brook studies—most of them made in that same pair of high-water boots. No one but the late Fritz Thaulow approaches him in giving the reality of this most difficult subject for an outdoor painter. The ocean surf repeats itself in its recurl and swash and by close watching a painter has often a chance to use his “second barrel,” so to speak, but the upturned face of an unruly brook-is not only million-tinted and endless in its expression, but so sensitive in its reflections that every passing cloud and patch of blue above it saddens or cheers it.
“Yes, painting water is enough to drive you mad,” burst out Knight, “but I don't intend to paint anything else—not for years, any way. Hired the mill so I could paint the water running away from you downhill. That's going to take a good many years to get hold of, but I'm going to stick it out. I can't always paint it from the banks, not if I want to study the middle ripples at my feet, and these are the ones that run out of your canvas just above your name-plate. Got to stand in it, I tell you. Then you get the drawing, and the drawing is what counts. Oh, I love it!” Knight stretched his big arms and legs and sprang from his chair.
“Really, fellows, I don't know anything about it. All I do is to let myself go. I always feel more than I see, and so my brush has a devil of a job to keep up. Marie! Marie!”
Had the good woman been a mile down the brook she could have heard him—she was only in the next room. “Bring in the boots—two pairs this time—we're going fishing. And, Marie—has the chauffeur had anything to eat?”
“Yes, monsieur.”
“Anything to drink?”
“No, monsieur.”
“What! Hand him this,” and he grabbed a half-empty bottle from the table.
I sprang forward and caught it before Marie got her fingers around it.