Being a woman I was often asked to paint female portraits, but suspecting the monetary value which the people would put on paintings I refused. Jan overheard a red-faced, wealthy looking farmer discussing with his father on our doorstep the question of how much I was likely to ask for a portrait of the farmer's daughter.
Red Face: "I think we might offer her ten pesetas."[16]
The Grandfather: "Well, she is foreign, she might demand fifteen."
Red Face: "Even if she wishes twenty we might yet consider it; or perhaps twenty-five; but then we would have to think it carefully over."
Occasionally we would be asked into houses to examine pictures which the peasants believed to have value. In one house, a room was set aside as a small private chapel; it was full of painted plaster images covered with false jewels and tinsel; on the walls were oleograph reproductions of the Virgin by Spanish Old Masters, but one painting of the Murillo School probably had a real value. In another house we found a picture of Napoleon before which the inhabitants were burning a candle under the impression that the print represented an unidentified Saint. Maybe stranger personalities have been canonized before now.
Jan escaped from intimate touch with the people by making for the open country. He thus had fewer adventures than did I. Often, however, peasants spied him from the distance of a mile, and came to see what he was doing.
Once, when he had been painting on the cart-road near El Angel and had put a cart into his painting, a small boy followed him all the way home, shouting out to every one that he passed:
"That is a painter! He painted a cart and horse; just as it went along; all in a flash!"
We used to pin up our sketches on the wall of the house; because, as we intended to travel, we wished the sketches to become as dry as we could make them. This used to attract numbers of people, and usually the grilled window of our front room was occupied by a crowd of faces peering into the house. The fame of our picture exhibition spread over the country-side. People came from some distance to see the pictures; and if the front door was unlocked walked in, saluted us, and proceeded to go the round of the walls. At first we found this disconcerting, but with use much of our needless self-consciousness and desire for unessential privacy began to wear off.