“Will you let me come again?” she asked.
“I am going to paint you,” he said; “I am going to paint you as you are. You won’t like it.”
“I shall if you make me solid,” she answered. “And you need flowers in this dark room. You must let me send you some.”
[BOOK TWO
BOHEMIA]
[I
THE POT-AU-FEU]
AT the exhibition, the portrait of Golda created no small stir. The critics, who, since Whistler, had been chary of denouncing new-comers, had swung to the opposite extravagance and were excessively eager to discover new masters. The youth of this Kühler made him fair game, for it supplied them with a proviso. They could hail his talent as that of a prodigy without committing themselves.
“The portrait of the artist’s mother,” wrote one of them, “has all the essentials of great art, as the early compositions of Mozart had all the essentials of great music. Here is real achievement, a work of art instinct with racial feeling, and therefore of true originality. No trace here of Parisian experiments. This picture is in the direct line from Holbein and Dürer.”
Mendel took this to mean that he was as good as Holbein and Dürer, and accepted it not as praise but as a statement of fact. The picture was bought by a well-known connoisseur, who wrote that he was proud to have such a picture in his collection.