“Joe, I ’ave made big mistake. ’Tis better he draw.”
Poor Pellegrini’s misfortunes dated from the time when, abandoning the practice of caricature, he sought to establish himself as a painter in oils. Soon after he had started upon this perilous enterprise he said to me one day at the Arts Club, “Joe, I will make that you have not told the lie.”
“You have say,” he replied, “that I shall be the finest portrait-painter of the day. You will see—I will be.”
As a matter of fact I had never ventured upon any such daring prophecy, neither did I have any faith in the chances of his success. Nor, I am sure, did he ever believe I had said it. It was rather, I suspect, a wily device of the Neapolitan to pledge my support for the new departure which he had taken in his art.
Towards the close of his life he rarely came to any Club, and I think he felt deeply the failure that had overtaken him.
Very quaintly, as we drove home one night, he gave expression to the consciousness that lay upon him that he had not long to live.
“When I die,” he said, “which ’appen short——” and then he turned away with the sentence unfinished.
Of his talent as a caricaturist there can never be any question. He had the rare power of finding an equation for every face, summarising in a few lines its salient points of oddity. And this same power he exhibited in his shrewd judgment of character. At a dinner-table little that was characteristic escaped his humorous regard. Though alien born, and almost jealously retaining to the end of his life amongst us his individuality as a foreigner, he possessed a quick and just appreciation of our national characteristics, more especially as they lent themselves to humorous portrayal.
He once said to me, “A man may caricature the people of a race that is not his own, but it needs a native to judge them seriously.”