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Privacy Overview. Necessary Always Enabled. I am a lover first, and then a painter. I would kill him on the morrow who should sully her with a glance!
Nay, you, my friend, I would kill you with my own hands in a moment if you did not kneel in reverence before her!
Now, will you have me submit my idol to the careless eyes and senseless criticisms of fools? The old man seemed to have grown young again; there was light and life in his eyes, and a faint flush of red in his pale face. His hands shook. Was Frenhofer sane or mad? Would it be possible to come to terms with this singular passion? Mine will be faithful to me forever. But you may die before you will find such a flawless beauty as hers, even in Asia, and then your picture will be left unfinished.
Perfumes are burning on a golden tripod by her side. And with that Porbus made a few steps toward the door. You are my conscience and my glory. No, no; I am a child. Let us go in. I shall still live on as a memory on your palette; that shall be life for me afterward. The door opened, and the two lovers encountered Porbus, who was surprised by the beauty of Gillette, whose eyes were full of tears. He hurried her, trembling from head to foot, into the presence of the old painter.
Frenhofer trembled. There stood Gillette in the artless and childlike attitude of some timid and innocent Georgian, carried off by brigands, and confronted with a slave merchant. A shamefaced red flushed her face, her eyes drooped, her hands hung by her side, her strength seemed to have failed her, her tears protested against this outrage.
Poussin cursed himself in despair that he should have brought his fair treasure from its hiding-place.
The girl turned joyously at the cry and the tone in which it was uttered, raised her eyes to his, looked at him, and fled to his arms. She had spirit enough to suffer in silence, but she had no strength to hide her joy. His vanity seemed to be engaged for his semblance of womanhood; he anticipated the triumph of the beauty of his own creation over the beauty of the living girl. She was watching Poussin and Porbus closely. She raised her head proudly; she glanced at Frenhofer, and her eyes flashed; then as she saw how her lover had fallen again to gazing at the portrait which he had taken at first for a Giorgione—.
He never gave me such a look. I will plunge it into your heart at the first cry from this young girl; I will set fire to your house, and no one shall leave it alive. Do you understand? Nicolas Poussin scowled; every word was a menace.
Porbus and Poussin stood at the door of the studio and looked at each other in silence. The young man kept his hand on the hilt of his dagger, and his ear was almost glued to the door. The two men standing in the shadow might have been conspirators waiting for the hour when they might strike down a tyrant.
He was radiant with delight. I can show her now with pride. Porbus and Poussin, burning with eager curiosity, hurried into a vast studio. Everything was in disorder and covered with dust, but they saw a few pictures here and there upon the wall. They stopped first of all in admiration before the life-size figure of a woman partially draped. This scorn for such works of art struck Porbus and Poussin dumb with amazement. They looked round for the picture of which he had spoken, and could not discover it.
His hair was disordered, his face aglow with a more than human exaltation, his eyes glittered, he breathed hard like a young lover frenzied by love. You are looking for a picture, and you see a woman before you. There is such depth in that canvas, the atmosphere is so true that you can not distinguish it from the air that surrounds us.
Where is art? Art has vanished, it is invisible! It is the form of a living girl that you see before you. Have I not caught the very hues of life, the spirit of the living line that defines the figure?
Is there not the effect produced there like that which all natural objects present in the atmosphere about them, or fishes in the water? Do you see how the figure stands out against the background? Does it not seem to you that you pass your hand along the back? But then for seven years I studied and watched how the daylight blends with the objects on which it falls.
And the hair, the light pours over it like a flood, does it not? Her breast—ah, see! Who would not fall on his knees before her? Her pulses throb. She will rise to her feet. The two painters left the old man to his ecstasy, and tried to ascertain whether the light that fell full upon the canvas had in some way neutralized all the effect for them. They moved to the right and left of the picture; they came in front, bending down and standing upright by turns.
In a corner of the canvas, as they came nearer, they distinguished a bare foot emerging from the chaos of color, half-tints and vague shadows that made up a dim, formless fog.
Its living delicate beauty held them spellbound. This fragment that had escaped an incomprehensible, slow, and gradual destruction seemed to them like the Parian marble torso of some Venus emerging from the ashes of a ruined town. Both artists turned involuntarily to Frenhofer.
They began to have some understanding, vague though it was, of the ecstasy in which he lived. What toil some of those shadows have cost me. Do you think that that effect has not cost unheard of toil? Look closely at my work, and you will understand more clearly what I was saying as to methods of modeling and outline. Look at the high lights on the bosom, and see how by touch on touch, thickly laid on, I have raised the surface so that it catches the light itself and blends it with the lustrous whiteness of the high lights, and how by an opposite process, by flattening the surface of the paint, and leaving no trace of the passage of the brush, I have succeeded in softening the contours of my figures and enveloping them in half-tints until the very idea of drawing, of the means by which the effect is produced, fades away, and the picture has the roundness and relief of nature.
Come closer. You will see the manner of working better; at a little distance it can not be seen. The old man, deep in his own musings, smiled at the woman he alone beheld, and did not hear.
What brought you here into my studio? The main characters of this fiction, classics story are Nicolas Poussin,. The book has been awarded with , and many others. Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator.
We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Richard Howard was born in Cleveland in From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician. Lists with This Book. It seemed to be about the power of the act of art as even greater than the product.
That introduces ethical questions in the mix, a possibility of conflict. I can only guess Balzac used the names of two real artists to give his tale and the fictional Frenhofer even more authenticity than his words already seem to do. Is it not the art which penetrates the soul most deeply? This is how Pourbus saw the Queen. He is the author of fourteen volumes of poetry and has published more than one hundred fifty translations from the French, including works by Gide, Stendhal, de Beauvoir, Baudelaire, and de Gaulle.
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