This version comes from Ireland, and is doubtless the correct original.
"Note," says Miss Conway, "the more than Greek delicacy with which the tragedy is told. No mutilation, no gore; just an effacement—prompt and absolute—'there wasn't any.' It would be hard to overpraise that fine touch."
CHAPTER X
CONCERNING CAT ARTISTS
While thousands of artists, first and last, have undertaken to paint cats, there are but few who have been able to do them justice. Artists who have possessed the technical skill requisite to such delicate work have rarely been willing to give to what they have regarded as unimportant subjects the necessary study; and those who have been willing to study cats seriously have possessed but seldom the skill requisite to paint them well.
Thomas Janvier, whose judgment on such matters is unquestioned, declares that not a dozen have succeeded in painting thoroughly good cat portraits, portraits so true to nature as to satisfy—if they could express their feelings in the premises—the cat subjects and their cat friends. Only four painters, he says, ever painted cats habitually and always well.
Two members of this small but highly distinguished company flourished about a century ago in widely separated parts of the world, and without either of them knowing that the other existed.
One was a Japanese artist, named Ho-Kou-Say, whose method of painting, of course, was quite unlike that to which we are accustomed in this western part of the world, but who had a wonderful faculty for making his queer little cat figures seem intensely alive.
The other was a Swiss artist, named Gottfried Mind, whose cat pictures are so perfect in their way that he came to be honorably known as "the Cat Raphael."