Katherine Keenum (27 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY

Where the Light Falls

O
n Monday, with Effie’s loan in hand, Jeanette went to M. Duran’s atelier for women on the Passage Stanislaus. The
massière
proved to be a smartly dressed woman named Lucile Dobbs. She was handsome in a chiseled way, with luxuriant auburn hair and a sensual mouth that hung open slightly as though she took in information from air passing over her moist lower lip. “Carolus says you have studied at the Colarossi or something,” she said, as she took down Jeanette’s name in a sloping hand and recorded the first month’s payment.

“The Académie Julian.”

Miss Dobbs shrugged as if the two establishments were interchangeable. “Then you know the routine. Set up wherever you like; it’s first come, first served here.” Her eye was already on the week’s model, who stood in the doorway.

“One thing, Miss Dobbs,” said Jeanette. “Is there someone I can send for a
bienvenue
?”

With a roll of her eyes and a much put-upon look, Miss Dobbs called out, “Rosalie!”

A
bonne
, whose young, pretty face was frozen into hostile correctness, answered, “
Mademoiselle?
”

Miss Dobbs told her curtly that Mlle. Palmer had an errand for her. Jeanette apologetically handed over some of the few coins found in the ginger jar.

“Ah, Palmer!” boomed Miss Reade.
“Bonjour, Rosalie.”

Rosalie thawed.
“B’jour, ma’amoiselle.”
She bounced the fist with the coins and nodded to Jeanette before disappearing again.

“Dobbs been rude?”

“I wouldn’t say
rude
.”

“Then you are too well brought up to be truthful. Pay no attention; the rest of us don’t.”

As Jeanette set up beside Miss Reade, she noticed at once that there were fewer easels than she was used to at Julian’s—also that everyone came stylishly, daintily, or expensively dressed. She was going to have to pay attention to cuffs and collars even if she could never again buy new clothes on the tight budget she and Effie had worked out.

After requesting the model to bare her shoulders and let down her hair, Miss Dobbs announced to the class that they would be working from the head alone this week. She looked down at her class book as if she had already forgotten Jeanette’s name, introduced her brusquely, and left. Before long, she returned, a step or two behind Carolus-Duran. Anyone not at her station hurried into place.

“What luck!” whispered Jeanette.

“Not luck, your arrival,” said Miss Reade. “Watch.”

In his loose working smock, Carolus-Duran swept to the center of the room, his dark eyes flashing from one student to the next. A few were favored by a wink or a nod; no one was left out. He bowed to the model and turned to greet the class.

“
Bonjour, mes filles
,” he said.

“
Bonjour, mon maître
,” they chorused.

He beckoned to Jeanette. Excited and self-conscious, she edged forward until he took her hand and turned her to face the class. They had met Mlle. Palmer,
n’est-ce pas
?
Bon.
Now to show her what was done here. An expectant semicircle formed behind him where Miss Dobbs had set a primed canvas board on an easel. Keeping Jeanette beside him, he now spoke to her as if there were no one else in the room.

“There are many valid ways to paint,” he said, in French. “I do not attempt to teach them all, only those I understand. If you can study only one artist,
mademoiselle
, study Velázquez. Meanwhile observe me.”

With a few masses smudged in by deft fingers, he achieved a minimal charcoal sketch of the model’s head. He held out the stick of charcoal in front of his eye to take a measurement with his thumb just like a beginner. He put in another touch or two; then, using some bread crumbs that Miss Dobbs held at the ready, he rubbed back to the white ground for a few highlights. “
Merci, ma chérie
,” he said, glancing up at his assistant with a disturbingly improper intimacy.

While a mollified Miss Dobbs applied fixative to the sketch, M. Duran began pulling tubes of paint out of a large pocket and asked Jeanette for her palette. On it, he laid an arc of a dozen colors—silver white, yellow ochre, raw sienna; on through several reds; cobalt; a transparent viridian green; and last near the thumb hole, bruxelles brown and ivory black. “These are the colors I habitually use myself,” he said. “I recommend them to you while you learn the method of this atelier. But in time, you will discover the ten to fifteen colors that best enable you to express the world as you see it. Then you must school your hand to reach for them as if by second nature.

“Now for the least underpainting. Study where the light falls and where the shadows lie. We commence by indicating the darkest masses.” Jeanette was familiar with the use of thin brown to compose a picture, but never had she seen work so broadly or so fluidly achieved. From a few swirls of a wide brush, the waves of the model’s hair on one side of her face emerged.

“The background is laid in even more broadly, only be careful that it is very thin and transparent where it touches the head.
Bon.
Now the shadows of the face . . .” M. Duran fell silent a moment as he shaped contours and the rest of the hair. “In the beginning, you will use thinner brushes to touch in details to the underpainting, but in time you should be able to go straight to color at this stage. Either way, what is most important now is to find the
demi-teinte generale
. Half close your eyes,
mademoiselle
; regard the model. Somewhere on the scale from the lightest mass to the darkest lies the central tone most characteristic of the face in general. Do you see it?”

“I-I think so.”

“Good. That will be the tone in which to paint most of the features no matter which pigments you use, with gradations down to the shadows and up very slightly for the highlights. As our time is limited, let me demonstrate what will become possible for you with practice.”

He began to paint in colors, using smaller brushes. In less than an hour, the portrait was finished, a fresh and beautiful likeness. His dazzling display of virtuosity had been accompanied throughout by instructions that clarified miracle after miracle. At each step, Jeanette was sure she understood what was done; but after a while, it all began to run together. At the thought of facing her own blank academy board, she wilted. Amused by her all-too-visible consternation, M. Duran assured her, “You will learn.”

He stood back to look at his own work. If a body could be said to strut while standing still, he strutted. “
Pas mal, eh?
” he exclaimed. “
Bon!
I leave you to it.” With a flourish, he returned Jeanette’s palette to her. If she could have afforded to replace it, she would have preserved it forever, allowing every scrap of remaining paint to dry hard.

*   *   *

That night, she returned from Julian’s to the Rue Jacob intending at least to paint a little picture of the palette with the colors set out in M. Duran’s order. She would write a rhapsodic letter home and decorate it with a watercolor copy. She was met by a telegram from her father:
NEVER BORROW
.

“I’ve had one, too,” said Cousin Effie, guiltily wringing a handkerchief. Hers read,
THANK YOU STOP NO MORE LOANS STOP FULL REFUND WIRED TO BANK
. “Oh, dear. I hope I haven’t caused trouble.”

Over the next three days, Judge Palmer’s disapproval weighed heavily on them both. Whenever her father was operatic in his complaints, Jeanette could be sure that his mood would change; but these telegrams had been grimly terse. She wrote a quick letter home the first night and began a second, longer one the next day. In her classes, she tried to focus all her attention on her work and leave off arguing mentally with her family, but she went back to the
pension
each night dreading to find a summons home to Circleville.

On Thursday morning, M. Duran came in around eleven thirty to criticize the pupils’ work, with a day left for corrections. (Mercifully, he passed over Jeanette’s clumsy first attempt.) Afterward, instead of leaving at once as M. Bouguereau always did at Julian’s, he dismissed the model and rested an elbow on her tall stool. Leaning casually against it with one foot crossed over the other ankle, he took out a cigarette from a flat, gold case. “You don’t mind?” he asked and, without waiting for an answer, lit up.

For a quarter of an hour, between long drags and exhalations of smoke, he lectured on what he called the sympathetic imagination. To paint with insight and individuality, the painter must draw on personal experience and interpret a client’s character or create figures for a dramatic picture. Women with their intuition were lucky, he said, but they as much as men could benefit from conscious exercises. He would give them an assignment. Over the next two weeks outside of class, they were to paint a picture based on the birth of Moses, illustrating the role of one of the women in the story: Moses’s mother, his sister Miriam, the Pharaoh’s daughter, or even one of her attendants.

He walked us through the story
, Jeanette wrote home that night,
and made us imagine each step by comparing it to something in our own lives. For Pharaoh’s daughter, he asked us whether we had ever found a lost child or some baby animal that we wanted to take care of. He told us to remember how it felt to hold a baby sister, and I could remember Mattie right after she was born, how soft she was, and how she smelled milky warm. He told us if we thought through all the possible moments in the story, there would be one when we’d say,
I can just see it!
and that’s the one we should choose. The funny thing is that what came to me most vividly was playing hide-and-seek down by the Scioto River one time when Sallie was running along bent over beside some bushes.
I can just see it!
I said, so Miriam following the baby in the reed basket is what I’m going to do.
She decorated the page with a baby’s face, a bulrush, and a quick sketch of a girl running at a crouch.
What was most inspiring, though, came at the end of the lecture. He said if we consulted our own experiences and feelings honestly, then even if we chose the same subject, all our pictures will be different, for each of us has an imagination that is hers alone. Do you know what I think I’m going to learn from M. Duran? Not technique, but how to know what I should be painting and how to do it my own way.

Her letter crossed in the mail with one from her mother, which arrived on Monday. Sarah Palmer was scathing. She called Jeanette reckless and selfish.
You betray a heedless disregard for Cousin Effie’s welfare
, she wrote, and elaborated. She decried her eldest daughter’s sense of her own importance at the expense of her sisters; she rebuked a feckless attitude toward money that approached dishonesty. The charges were worked and reworked, in a small intense hand, front and back for two full sheets. Sickened by shame as she read, but also by frustration, Jeanette had to force herself to finish the letter. Then she was angry.

Over the weekend, she had devoted many hours to pencil sketches for her Moses composition. At Amy and Sonja’s studio on Saturday, Emily had agreed to pose for the figure of Miriam; and since it was necessary to work fast, even Effie had agreed that time spent on Sunday afternoon in their own room on a biblical study could, at a pinch, be considered observing the Sabbath. A finished charcoal study was ready to be copied into an underpainting, but now she almost hated it. Although she had always known her execution would be the worst in the class, she had cherished hopes of originality. Working on the assignment had felt like an immense step forward. Her mother’s scorn robbed it of all value.

She put her head down on the table and sobbed.

Very quietly, Effie pulled the pages of the letter out from under her hand and leaned over to read them in a small pool of light from the oil lamp. As she read, she made little bleating noises. “Oh, dear,” she said, “oh, dear. It never occurred to me that Cousin Joseph would have any difficulty . . .”

“He didn’t. Mother loves to think of us as paupers for no good reason,” said Jeanette, into her arms. “It suits her sense of pioneer virtue, and it means she doesn’t have to grant Papa what a big success he has made in the world.”

“Jeanette! Don’t talk like that about your mother! It’s disrespectful.”

“Well, it’s true.”

Effie was not entirely convinced. Her lower jaw wobbled as she tried to pull her thoughts together. She put a tentatively consoling hand on Jeanette’s shoulder. “All the same, I, I must write Sarah and apologize. I have written Cousin Joseph, but I must let her know that it was I who pushed you.”

“It won’t make any difference, and you didn’t,” said Jeanette, still pressing her eyes into her forearm. “Mother hates it that I’m here. She hates that I can draw. She’ll hate it if I learn to paint well. She hates
me
.”

“Now, Jeanette, calm down. That’s going too far.” Sarah Palmer did not hate her daughter any more than Maude Hendrick had hated hers when
her
girls came running with the self-same wail to Effie, but the vehemence of Sarah’s letter was worrying. As family factotum, Effie preferred never to take sides; but she had done so in a big way when she enabled Jeanette to come to Paris, and the loan only compounded that first transgression.