The Portrait

It was at Mrs. Mellish's, one Sunday afternoon last spring. We were
talking over George Lillo's portraits--a collection of them was being
shown at Durand-Ruel's--and a pretty woman had emphatically declared:--

"Nothing on earth would induce me to sit to him!"

There was a chorus of interrogations.

"Oh, because--he makes people look so horrid; the way one looks on board
ship, or early in the morning, or when one's hair is out of curl and one
knows it. I'd so much rather be done by Mr. Cumberton!"

Little Cumberton, the fashionable purveyor of rose-water pastels, stroked
his moustache to hide a conscious smile.

"Lillo is a genius--that we must all admit," he said indulgently, as
though condoning a friend's weakness; "but he has an unfortunate
temperament. He has been denied the gift--so precious to an artist--of
perceiving the ideal. He sees only the defects of his sitters; one might
almost fancy that he takes a morbid pleasure in exaggerating their weak
points, in painting them on their worst days; but I honestly believe he
can't help himself. His peculiar limitations prevent his seeing anything
but the most prosaic side of human nature--

"'_A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose is to him,
And it is nothing more._'"

Cumberton looked round to surprise an order in the eye of the lady whose
sentiments he had so deftly interpreted, but poetry always made her
uncomfortable, and her nomadic attention had strayed to other topics. His
glance was tripped up by Mrs. Mellish.

"Limitations? But, my dear man, it's because he hasn't any limitations,
because he doesn't wear the portrait-painter's conventional blinders, that
we're all so afraid of being painted by him. It's not because he sees only
one aspect of his sitters, it's because he selects the real, the typical
one, as instinctively as a detective collars a pick-pocket in a crowd. If
there's nothing to paint--no real person--he paints nothing; look at the
sumptuous emptiness of his portrait of Mrs. Guy Awdrey"--("Why," the
pretty woman perplexedly interjected, "that's the only nice picture he
ever did!") "If there's one positive trait in a negative whole he brings
it out in spite of himself; if it isn't a nice trait, so much the worse
for the sitter; it isn't Lillo's fault: he's no more to blame than a
mirror. Your other painters do the surface--he does the depths; they paint
the ripples on the pond, he drags the bottom. He makes flesh seem as
fortuitous as clothes. When I look at his portraits of fine ladies in
pearls and velvet I seem to see a little naked cowering wisp of a soul
sitting beside the big splendid body, like a poor relation