



Produced by Alfred J. Drake.  HTML version by Al Haines.









IMAGINARY PORTRAITS

By WALTER HORATIO PATER





E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D. Electronic Version 1.0 / Date
10-12-01



NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:

Reliability: Although I have done my best to ensure that the text you
read is error-free in comparison with an exact reprint of the standard
edition--Macmillan's 1910 Library Edition--please exercise scholarly
caution in using it.  It is not intended as a substitute for the
printed original but rather as a searchable supplement. My e-texts may
prove convenient substitutes for hard-to-get works in a course where
both instructor and students accept the possibility of some
imperfections in the text, but if you are writing a scholarly article,
dissertation, or book, you should use the standard hard-copy editions
of any works you cite.

Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy, I
have transferred original pagination to brackets.  A bracketed numeral
such as [22] indicates that the material immediately following the
number marks the beginning of the relevant page.  I have preserved
paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.

Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an e-text
does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.

Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
Pater's Greek quotations.  If there is a need for the original Greek,
it can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a
Victorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater
and many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.





CONTENTS




I.   A Prince of Court Painters: 3-44

II.  Denys L'Auxerrois: 45-77

III. Sebastian Van Storck: 79-115

IV.  Duke Carl of Rosenmold: 117-153




IMAGINARY PORTRAITS




I.  A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS


EXTRACTS FROM AN OLD FRENCH JOURNAL


Valenciennes, September 1701.

[5] 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 work-people 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
[6] 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 father questioned him and commended his work.  But the lad
seemed not greatly pleased, and left untasted the glass of old Malaga
which was offered to him.  His father will hear nothing of educating
him as a painter.  Yet he is not ill-to-do, and has lately built
himself a new stone house, big and grey and cold.  Their old plastered
house with the black timbers, in the Rue des Cardinaux, was prettier;
dating from the time of the Spaniards, and one of the oldest in
Valenciennes.

October 1701.

Chiefly through the solicitations of my father, old Watteau has
consented to place Antony with a teacher of painting here.  I meet him
betimes on the way to his lessons, as I return from Mass; for he still
works with the masons, [7] but making the most of late and early hours,
of every moment of liberty.  And then he has the feast-days, of which
there are so many in this old-fashioned place.  Ah! such gifts as his,
surely, may once in a way make much industry seem worth while.  He
makes a wonderful progress.  And yet, far from being set-up, and too
easily pleased with what, after all, comes to him so easily, he has, my
father thinks, too little self-approval for ultimate success.  He is
apt, in truth, to fall out too hastily with himself and what he
produces.  Yet here also there is the "golden mean."  Yes!  I could
fancy myself offended by a sort of irony which sometimes crosses the
half-melancholy sweetness of manner habitual with him; only that as I
can see, he treats himself to the same quality.

October 1701.

Antony Watteau comes here often now.  It is the instinct of a natural
fineness in him, to escape when he can from that blank stone house,
with so little to interest, and that homely old man and woman.  The
rudeness of his home has turned his feeling for even the simpler graces
of life into a physical want, like hunger or thirst, which might come
to greed; and methinks he perhaps overvalues these things. Still, made
as he is, his hard fate in that rude place must needs touch one.  And
then, he profits by the experience of [8] my father, who has much
knowledge in matters of art beyond his own art of sculpture; and Antony
is not unwelcome to him.  In these last rainy weeks especially, when he
can't sketch out of doors, when the wind only half dries the pavement
before another torrent comes, and people stay at home, and the only
sound from without is the creaking of a restless shutter on its hinges,
or the march across the Place of those