The Project Gutenberg EBook of Imaginary Portraits, by Walter Pater

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Title: Imaginary Portraits

Author: Walter Pater

Posting Date: March 27, 2009 [EBook #2399]
Release Date: November, 2000

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IMAGINARY PORTRAITS ***

Produced by Bruce McClintock. HTML version by Al Haines.

IMAGINARY PORTRAITS

by

Walter Pater

4th edition

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS
CHAPTER II. DENYS L'AUXERROIS
CHAPTER III. SEBASTIAN VAN STORCK
CHAPTER IV. DUKE CARL OF ROSENMOLD

CHAPTER I. A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS

EXTRACTS FROM AN OLD FRENCH JOURNAL

Valenciennes, September 1701.

They have been renovating my father's large workroom. That delightful,
tumble-down old place has lost its moss-grown tiles and the green
weather-stains we have known all our lives on the high whitewashed
wall, opposite which we sit, in the little sculptor's yard, for the
coolness, in summertime. Among old Watteau's workpeople came his son,
"the genius," my father's godson and namesake, a dark-haired youth,
whose large, unquiet eyes seemed perpetually wandering to the various
drawings which lie exposed here. My father will have it that he is a
genius indeed, and a painter born. We have had our September Fair in
the Grande Place, a wonderful stir of sound and colour in the wide,
open space beneath our windows. And just where the crowd was busiest
young Antony was found, hoisted into one of those empty niches of the
old Hotel de Ville, sketching the scene to the life, but with a kind of
grace--a marvellous tact of omission, as my father pointed out to us,
in dealing with the vulgar reality seen from one's own window--which
has made trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine, seem like people in
some fairyland; or like infinitely clever tragic actors, who, for the
humour of the thing, have put on motley for once, and are able to throw
a world of serious innuendo into their burlesque looks, with a sort of
comedy which shall be but tragedy seen from the other side. He brought
his sketch to our house to-day, and I was present when my fa