About Paris

by Richard Harding Davis

"Of course," answered my friend. "Can't even you see that?"

I tried to see it, but I could not. I had only just arrived in Paris.

There was another artist with a studio across the bridges, and his love of art cost him much money and some severe trials. His suite of rooms was all in blue, gray, white, and black. He said that if you looked at things in the world properly, you would see that they were all gray, blue, or black. He had painted a gray lady in a gray dress, with a blue parrot on her shoulder. She had brown lips and grayish teeth. He was very much disappointed in me when I told him that lips always looked to me either pink or red. He explained by saying that my eyes were not trained properly. I resented this, and told him that my eyes were as good as his own, and that a recruiting officer had once tested them with colored yarns and letters of the alphabet held up in inaccessible corners, and had given me a higher mark for eyesight than for anything else. He said it was not a question of colored yarns; and that while I might satisfy a recruiting sergeant that I could distinguish an ammunition train from a travelling circus, it did not render me a critic on art matters. He pointed out that the eyes of the women in the Caucasus who make rugs are trained to distinguish a hundred and eighty different shades of colors that other eyes cannot see; and in time, he added, I would see that everything in real life looked flat and gray. I took a red carnation out of my coat, and put it over the gray lady's lips, and asked him whether he would call it gray or red, and he said that was no argument.

He suffered a great deal in his efforts to live up to his ideas, but assured me that he was much happier than I in my ignorance of what was beautiful. He explained, for instance, that he would like to put up some of the photographs of his family that he had brought with him around his room, but that he could not do it, because photographs were so undecorative. So he kept them in his trunk. He also kept a green cage full of doves because they were gray and white and decorative, and in spite of the fact that they were a nuisance, and always flying away, and being caught again by small boys, who brought them back, and wanted a franc for so doing. He suffered, too, in his inability to find the shade of blue for his chair covers that would harmonize with the rest of his room. He covered the furniture five times, and never successfully, and hence the cushions of his lounge and stiff chairs were still as white as when they had last gone to the upholsterer's.

These young men are friends of mine, and I am sure they will not object to my describing their ateliers, of which they were very proud. They believed in their own schools, and in their own ways of looking at art, and no one could laugh or argue them out of it; consequently they deserved credit for the faith that was in them. They are chiefly interesting here as showing how a young man will develop in the artistic atmosphere of Paris. It is only when he ceases to develop, and sinks into the easy lethargy of a life of pleasure there, that he becomes uninteresting.

There was still another young man whom I knew there who can serve here now as an example of the American who stops in Paris too long.

I first met this artist at a garden-party, and he asked me if I did not think it dull, and took me for a walk up to Montmartre, talking all the way of what a great and beautiful mother Paris was to those who worked there. His home was in Maine, and he let me know, without reflecting on his native town, that he had been choked and cramped there, and that his life had been the life of a Siberian exile. Here he found people who could understand; here, the very statues and buildings gave him advice and encouragement; here were people who took him and his work seriously, and who helped him on to fresh endeavors, and who made work a delight.

"I have one picture in the Salon," he said, flushing with proper pride and pleasure, "and one has just gone to the World's Fair, and another has received an honorable mention at Munich. That's pretty good for my first year, is it not? And I'm only twenty-five years old now," he added, with his eyes smiling into the future at the great things he was to do. Nobody could resist the contagion of his enthusiasm and earnestness of purpose.