you cannot think of without derisive laughter or an
embarrassed shrug of the shoulders. Nature had made him a buffoon.
He was a painter, but a very bad one, whom I had met
in Rome, and I still remembered his pictures. He had a
genuine enthusiasm for the commonplace. His soul palpitating
with love of art, he painted the models who hung about the
stairway of Bernini in the Piazza de Spagna, undaunted by
their obvious picturesqueness; and his studio was full of
canvases on which were portrayed moustachioed, large-eyed
peasants in peaked hats, urchins in becoming rags, and women
in bright petticoats. Sometimes they lounged at the steps of
a church, and sometimes dallied among cypresses against a
cloudless sky; sometimes they made love by a Renaissance well-head,
and sometimes they wandered through the Campagna by the side
of an ox-waggon. They were carefully drawn and carefully painted.
A photograph could not have been more exact. One of
the painters at the Villa Medici had called him <i Le Maitre
de la Boite a Chocoloats.> To look at his pictures you would
have thought that Monet, Manet, and the rest of the
Impressionists had never been.

"I don't pretend to be a great painter," he said, "I'm not a
Michael Angelo, no, but I have something. I sell. I bring
romance into the homes of all sorts of people. Do you know,
they buy my pictures not only in Holland, but in Norway and
Sweden and Denmark? It's mostly merchants who buy them, and
rich tradesmen. You can't imagine what the winters are like
in those countries, so long and dark and cold. They like to
think that Italy is like my pictures. That's what they
expect. That's what I expected Italy to be before I came
here."

And I think that was the vision that had remained with him
always, dazzling his eyes so that he could not see the truth;
and notwithstanding the brutality of fact, he continued to see
with the eyes of the spirit an Italy of romantic brigands and
picturesque ruins. It was an ideal that he painted -- a poor one,
common and shop-soiled, but still it was an ideal; and it
gave his character a peculiar charm.

It was because I felt this that Dirk Stroeve was not to me, as to
others, merely an object of ridicule. His fellow-painters made no
secret of their contempt for his work, but he earned a fair amount of
money, and they did not hesitate to make free use of his purse. He was
generous, and the needy, laughing at him because he believed so