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
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.
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