A Patron of Art

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Title:     A Patron of Art
Author: Richard Harding Davis [More Titles by Davis]

Young Carstairs and his wife had a studio at Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue, where Carstairs painted pictures and Mrs. Carstairs mended stockings and wrote letters home to her people in Vermont. Young Carstairs had had a picture in the Salon, and was getting one ready for the Academy, which he hoped to have accepted if he lived long enough to finish it. They were very poor. Not so poor that there was any thought of Carstairs starving to death, but there was at least a possibility that he would not be able to finish his picture in the studio, for which he could not pay the rent. He was very young and had no business to marry; but she was willing, and her people had an idea it would come out all right. They had only three hundred dollars left, and it was mid-winter.

Carstairs went out to sketch Broadway at One Hundred and Fifty-ninth Street, where it is more of a country road than anything else, and his hands almost froze while he was getting down the black lines of the bare trees, and the deep, irregular ruts in the road, where the mud showed through the snow. He intended to put a yellow sky behind this, and a house with smoke coming out of the chimney, and with red light shining through the window, and call it _Winter_.

A horse and buggy stopped just back of him, and he was conscious from the shadows on the snow that the driver was looking down from his perch.

Carstairs paid no attention to his spectator. He was used to working with Park policemen and nursery-maids looking over his shoulder and making audible criticisms or giggling hysterically. So he sketched on and became unconscious of the shadow falling on the snow in front of him; and when he looked up about a quarter of an hour later and noticed that the shadow was still there, he smiled at the tribute such mute attention paid his work. When the sketch was finished he leaned back and closed one eye, and moved his head from side to side and surveyed it critically. Then he heard a voice over his shoulder say, in sympathetic tones, "Purty good, isn't it?" He turned and smiled at his critic, and found him to be a fat, red-faced old gentleman, wrapped in a great fur coat with fur driving-gloves and fur cap.

"You didn't mind my watching you, did you?" asked the old gentleman.

Carstairs said no, he did not mind. The other said that it must be rather cold drawing in such weather, and Carstairs said yes, it was; but that you couldn't get winter and snow in June.

"Exactly," said the driver; "you've got to take it as it comes. How are you going back?"

Carstairs said he would walk to One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street and take the elevated.

"You'd better get in here," said the older man. "Do you know anything about trotting?" Carstairs got in, and showed that he did know something about trotting by his comments on the mare in front of him. This seemed to please the old gentleman, and he beamed on Carstairs approvingly. He asked him a great many questions about his work, and told him that he owned several good pictures himself, but admitted that it was at his wife's and daughter's suggestion that he had purchased them. "They made me get 'em when we were in Paris," he said, "and they cost a lot of money, and a heap more before I got 'em through the Custom-house." He mentioned the names of the artists who had painted them, and asked Carstairs if he had ever heard of them, and Carstairs said yes, that he knew of them all, and had studied under some of them.

"They're purty high up, I guess," suggested the driver, tentatively.

"Oh, yes," Carstairs answered, lending himself to the other's point of view, "you needn't be afraid of ever losing on your investment. Those pictures will be worth more every year."

This seemed to strike the older man as a very sensible way to take his gallery, and he said, when they had reached the studio, that he would like to see more of Mr. Carstairs and to look at his pictures. His name, he said, was Cole. Carstairs smilingly asked him if he was any relation to the railroad king, of whom the papers spoke as King Cole, and was somewhat embarrassed when the old gentleman replied, gravely, that he was that King Cole himself. Carstairs had a humorous desire to imprison him in his studio and keep him for ransom. Some one held the horse, and the two men went up to the sixth floor and into Carstairs's studio, where they discovered pretty Mrs. Carstairs in the act of sewing a new collar-band on one of her husband's old shirts. She went on at this while the railroad king, who seemed a very simple, kindly old gentleman, wandered around the studio and turned over the pictures, but made no comment. It had been a very cold drive, and Carstairs felt chilled, so he took the hot water his wife had for her tea and some Scotch whiskey and a bit of lemon, and filled a glass with it for his guest and for himself. Mrs. Carstairs rose and put some sugar in King Cole's glass and stirred it for him, and tasted it out of the spoon and coughed, which made the old gentleman laugh. Then he lighted a cigar, and sat back in a big arm-chair and asked many questions, until, before they knew it, the young people had told him a great deal about themselves--almost everything except that they were poor. He could never guess that, they thought, because the studio was so handsomely furnished and in such a proper neighborhood. It was late in the afternoon, and quite dark, when their guest departed, without having made any comment on the paintings he had seen, and certainly without expressing any desire to purchase one.

Mrs. Carstairs said, when her husband told her who their guest had been, that they ought to have held a pistol to his head and made him make out a few checks for them while they had him about. "Billionaires don't drop in like that every day," said she. "I really don't think we appreciated our opportunity."

They were very much surprised a few days later when the railroad king rang at the door, and begged to be allowed to come in and get warm, and to have another glass of hot Scotch. He did this very often, and they got to like him very much. He said he did not care for his club, and his room at home was too strongly suggestive of the shop, on account of the big things he had thought over there, but that their studio was so bright and warm; and they reminded him, he said, of the days when he was first married, before he was rich. They tried to imagine what he was like when he was first married, and failed utterly. Mrs. Carstairs was quite sure he was not at all like her husband.

* * * * *

There was a youth who came to call on the Misses Cole, who had a great deal of money, and who was a dilettante in art. He had had a studio in Paris, where he had spent the last two years, and he wanted one, so he said at dinner one day, in New York.

Old Mr. Cole was seated but one place away from him, and was wondering when the courses would stop and he could get upstairs. He did not care for the dinners his wife gave, but she always made him come to them. He never could remember whether the roast came before or after the bird, and he was trying to guess how much longer it would be before he would be allowed to go, when he overheard the young man at his daughter's side speaking.

"The only studio in the building that I would care to have," said the young man, "is occupied at present. A young fellow named Carstairs has it, but he is going to give it up next week, when I will move in. He has not been successful in getting rid of his pictures, and he and his wife are going back to Vermont to live. I feel rather sorry for the chap, for he is really very clever and only needs a start. It is almost impossible for a young artist to get on here, I imagine, unless he knows people, or unless some one who is known buys his work."

"Yes," said Miss Cole, politely. "Didn't you say you met the Whelen girls before you left Paris? Were they really such a success at Homburg?"

Mr. Cole did not eat any more dinner, but sat thoughtfully until he was allowed to go. Then he went out into the hall, and put on his overcoat and hat.

The Carstairses were dismantling the studio. They had been at it all day, and they were very tired. It seemed so much harder work to take the things down and pack them away than it did to unpack them and put them up in appropriate corners and where they would show to the best advantage.

The studio looked very bare indeed, for the rugs and altar cloths and old curtains had been stripped from the walls, and the pictures and arms and plaques lay scattered all over the floor. It was only a week before Christmas, and it seemed a most inappropriate time to evict one's self. "And it's hardest," said Carstairs, as he rolled up a great Daghestan rug and sat on it, "to go back and own up that you're a failure."

"A what!" cried young Mrs. Carstairs, indignantly. "Aren't you ashamed of yourself? You're not a failure. It's the New Yorkers who don't know what's good when it's shown them. They'll buy all those nasty French pictures because they're expensive and showy, and they can't understand what's true and good. They're not educated up to it, and they won't be for fifty years yet."

"Fifty years is a long time to wait," said her husband, resignedly, "but if necessary we can give them that much time. And we were to have gone abroad, and taken dinner at Bignon's, and had a studio in Montmartre."

"Well, you needn't talk about that just now," said Mrs. Carstairs, as she shook out an old shawl. "It's not cheerful."

There came a knock at the door, and the railroad king walked in, covered with snow. "Goodness me!" exclaimed King Cole, "what are you doing?"

They told him they were going back to Vermont to spend Christmas and the rest of the winter.

"You might have let me know you were going," said the king. "I had something most important to say to you, and you almost gave me the slip."

He seated himself very comfortably and lighted a fat, black cigar, which he chewed as he smoked. "You know," he said, "that I was brought up in Connecticut. I own the old homestead there still, and a tenant of mine lives in it. I've got a place in London, or, I mean, my wife has, and one in Scotland, and one in Brittany, a chateau, and one in--well, I've a good many here and there. I keep 'em closed till I want 'em. I've never been to the shooting-place in Scotland--my sons go there--nor to the London house, but I have to the French place, and I like it next best to only one other place on earth. Because it's among big trees and on a cliff, where you can see the ships all day, and the girls in colored petticoats catching those little fish you eat with brown bread. I go there in the summer and sit on the cliff, and smoke and feel just as good as though I owned the whole coast and all the sea in sight. I bought a number of pictures of Brittany, and the girls had the place photographed by a fellow from Paris, with the traps in the front yard, and themselves and their friends on the front terrace in groups. But it never seemed to me to be just what I remembered of the place. And so what I want to ask is, if you'll go up to my old place in Connecticut and paint me a picture of it as I used to know it when I was a boy, so that I can have it by me in my room. A picture with the cow-path leading up from the pool at the foot of the hill, and the stone walls, and the corn piled on the fields, and the pumpkins lying around, and the sun setting behind the house. Paint it on one of these cold, snappy afternoons, when your blood tingles and you feel good that you're alive. And when you get through with that, I'd like you to paint me a picture to match it of the chateau, and as many little sketches of the fishermen, and the girls with the big white hats and bare legs and red petticoats, as you choose. You can live in the homestead till that picture's done, and then you can cross over and live in the chateau.

"I don't see that there is anything wrong in painting a picture to order, is there? You paint a portrait to order, why shouldn't you paint an old house, or a beautiful castle on a cliff, with the sea beyond it? If you wish, I'll close with you now and call it a bargain."

Mrs. Carstairs had been standing all this time with an unframed picture in one hand, and a dust brush in the other, and her husband had been sitting on the rolled-up Turkish rug and trying not to look at her.

"I'd like to do it very well," he said, simply.

"Well, that's good," replied the railroad king, heartily. "You'll need a retaining fee, I suppose, like lawyers do; and you put your best work on the two pictures and remember what they mean to _me_, and put the spirit of home into them. It's my home you're painting, do you understand? I think you do. That's why I asked you instead of asking any of the others. Now, you know how I feel about it, and you put the feeling into the picture; and as to the price, you ask whatever you please, and you live at my houses and at my expense until the work is done. If I don't see you again," he said, as he laid a check down on the table among the brushes and paint tubes and cigars, "I will wish you a merry Christmas." Then he hurried out and banged the door behind him and escaped their thanks, and left them alone together.

The pictures of Breton life and landscape were exhibited a year later in Paris, and in the winter in New York, and, as they bore the significant numerals of the Salon on the frame, they were immediately appreciated, and many people asked the price. But the attendant said they were already sold to Mr. Cole, the railroad king, who had purchased also the great artistic success of the exhibition--an old farm-house with a wintry landscape, and the word "Home" printed beneath it.

[The end]
Richard Harding Davis's short story: Patron of Art

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