The Shadow Portrait (19 page)

“I hope,” she whispered to Charley, “he comes back tomorrow.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Taking an Offering

When Phil Winslow grew discouraged and it seemed no one would ever buy even one of his paintings, he would seek out the older man who had become both a close friend and a valued counselor. Now he walked slowly along the snowy street, so preoccupied with his struggle for recognition that he didn’t even notice the children engaged in a ferocious snowball fight around him. Suddenly a hard-packed missile skimmed his cheek, stinging him and making him look up in surprise.

“Hey, watch out there!” He grinned and reached down, scooping up a handful of the loose, wet snow. Quickly molding it into a firm ball, he took careful aim and sent the snowball flying at the grinning, redheaded ragamuffin nearby but missed as the boy agilely dodged out of the way.

“Nah, you couldn’t hit nothin’!” the boy yelled with delight, before packing another snowball and firing back at Phil. Phil took it on the shoulder, then threw himself into the fight. Enjoying the contest, he tried to return the boy’s well-aimed volleys for a few minutes, but then, throwing his hands up in surrender, he laughed and shook his head. “You’re too good for me, bud,” he said. “You need to be pitching in professional baseball.”

“That’s what I’m gonna do,” the redhead said, nodding confidently. “You just wait and see. Someday you’ll be sayin’, ‘I got hit with a snowball by Red Pickens back when he was only ten years old.’ ”

“Red Pickens. I’ll remember that name,” Phil said, then passed on down the street.

An arctic blast had hit the city the night before, and now the cold cut to the bone. Looking up, he saw the inevitable washing out on lines strung between the buildings and across balconies, frozen, stiff, and hard. Instead of floating in the breeze, long underwear, shifts, shirts, trousers, and dresses swung in unison like a frozen wave as the wind whipped them back and forth. Pulling his overcoat closely about him, Phil blew on his hands, then jammed them into his pockets. He made his way along the streets until he arrived at a three-story red-brick building that had once been a mansion but now was a run-down tenement house. Moving up the steps, careful not to slip on the snow that had packed into slippery ice, he knocked on the door.

Almost at once it was opened by a short man with a shock of dark hair and a walrus mustache. A cigar was clenched between his teeth, sending a spiral of gray smoke upward, and Robert Henri removed it long enough to say, “Come in, cowboy, before you freeze to death.”

Henri always called Phil “cowboy” because of his background, and now his brown eyes glinted as he said, “You bring anything for me to look at?”

“Not this time, Robert.”

“You’re getting lazy,” Henri grunted. “Come on in. We’re having a lively discussion.”

As Phil stepped into the smoke-filled apartment, he saw two other painters, George Luks and John Sloan, sitting at the kitchen table. Their wives were gathered on the sofa, enjoying their own visit. Phil greeted the women, then joined the men at the table. Soon he was sipping strong coffee and enjoying the talk. He glanced at the three men and thought,
There probably are no three better artists in all of America, but nobody knows it.

His judgment may have been good concerning their abilities, but the three men had received little recognition for their
particular type of art. Robert Henri, who was recognized more for his teaching than for his own painting, had one rule. “Forget about art,” he would tell his classes, “and paint pictures of what interests you in life.” For Henri this meant the city of New York. He had passed on to some of his students his passion for painting the denizens of the Bowery and the Lower East Side, the poorest and most crowded parts of the city. Now his students carried out his concepts with vigor, boldness, and vision.

John Sloan, who sat next to Phil, was a man no one would notice in a crowd. Average in all things, from his nondescript brown hair and mild blue eyes, he preferred unsavory sections of New York like the Tenderloin. He turned out picture after picture of the tawdry, vice-ridden life he found there, preferring to paint ordinary people rather than Mrs. Astor’s “Four Hundred” of the social elite. He had run for the state assembly as a Socialist the previous year and readily admitted that he was glad to lose. He was forty years old now and had sold only three paintings, but his biggest success had come when President Theodore Roosevelt had admired one of his paintings—”Three Women on a Roof Drying Their Hair”—but had not purchased it. Sloan felt strongly about art, and sometimes his deep bass voice would rumble until it overwhelmed those who listened to his passionate discourses.

George Luks, who sat next to Henri, was, in Phil Winslow’s opinion, the best painter of the group. At least the best portraitist. He had led a fascinating life, studying in Paris and Dusseldorf, and he used broad swatches of color to energize the figures in his paintings. He was a burly man, powerful and thick shouldered, much like the men in his many paintings of bar scenes.

Luks had brought a painting, and Henri had placed it on an easel. Now they all criticized it loudly and enthusiastically. It was a system that was hard on artists, but Henri felt that the only way to improve a man’s work was to make him
see how he could have done better, starting by showing him where he went wrong.

“George, this painting has a lot to be said for it,” Henri observed mildly. The picture was of a crowd of immigrants, the background a row of tenement houses. “You’ve made it too busy,” Henri said. “There are so many people that the viewer can’t really concentrate on any one.”

“Have you ever been down on Hester Street?” Luks demanded aggressively. “That’s what it looks like, Robert!”

“An artist just doesn’t paint what something looks like. He’s got to cause the viewer to see what he wants him to see.”

“I don’t agree with that at all,” Sloan spoke up. He sipped his coffee thoughtfully, then rumbled, “It’s our job to paint what we see. That’s what George saw down on Hester Street, and that’s what he ought to paint.”

Henri, however, only became more emphatic. “That’s not the way art is! Art always selects!”

“I don’t understand that,” Phil said. “What do you mean, ‘selects’?”

“Well, suppose someone set out to describe in detail everything that happened to a character in a novel. He could include scenes of all the actions a character might do, but it would make the book terribly slow and boring. The writer carefully selects the scenes he wants his reader to remember. Those that are important to his story.” Henri turned to Luks and poked at him with his finger. “And that’s what you haven’t done in this one, George!”

“I’m not sure I agree.” Sloan shook his head. “I think the busyness here is what George was trying to get at, wasn’t it, George?”

“Why, of course!” Turning to Henri, George’s face grew animated, and he raised his beefy hands to illustrate his point by gesturing and pointing at the fine details of the painting. “I wanted to show what life was like on Hester Street, and that’s how busy it is. This fellow right in the front, wearing the white hat and smoking the cigar—I suppose he’s the central
figure. But suppose I left everybody else out. Why, it wouldn’t have been like Hester Street at all—unless it was midnight.”

The argument went on with energy, and Phil was amused when Luks grew somewhat antagonistic, but finally Robert Henri smiled. He was a charming man and a great teacher. “I think you’re right after all, George, and I do get the sense of tremendous activity from your painting. You were right and I am wrong.”

Luks stared at his teacher. He had been prepared to offer a more rousing defense, but now he could not, since Henri had given him such praise. Embarrassed, he turned to Phil and said, “You didn’t bring anything?”

“Didn’t have anything worth bringing,” Phil shrugged. “I thought I might just pick up some hints from you fellows.”

“That’s no good,” Henri said in disgust. “The only thing that teaches a painter anything is to paint! I’ve been to enough art classes to know that all you learn to do is
talk
about painting.”

“That’s right,” Sloan said quickly. “There’s too much talk in art and not enough doing. How many people do I know that started out with some talent, but they wound up talking about what they were doing, and not doing it!”

The companions continued their talk around the table, Sloan and Luks puffing away on their pipes, until their wives shooed them away from the table long enough to set it. Then they all sat down to a plain but nourishing meal of roast beef, cabbage, and fresh-baked biscuits.

When all were finished and the women had cleared the table and started washing up, Phil took a chair back in a corner and mostly just listened to his fellow artists’ conversation, contributing only occasionally. It was a time of peace and enjoyment for him, for his visits to Henri’s were always encouraging. Finally he rose, however, and promising to bring some of his work to the next meeting, he took his leave.

On his way back down Eighteenth Street, he stopped in at George Maxim’s Gallery. Maxim, as usual, was sitting on a
high stool behind the counter, reading a German book. His eyes lit up as Phil walked in, and he carefully marked the book with a slip of paper. “Well, good to see you, Phil.”

“How are you, Max?”

“Fine . . . just fine.” He came around to shake hands with Phil, then said regretfully, “No sales as yet, but you’re a young man. Your time will come.”

Phil had been encouraged by all the talk at Henri’s, but during the walk the enormity of his quest suddenly had come upon him. He knew there were hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of young artists—and old ones, too, in New York—all thinking they were going to be successful painters someday. He was well aware that most of them would never fulfill their dreams. He had begun to wonder if he would be one of those impoverished, unnoticed painters who spent their entire lives pursuing a goal that could never be achieved.

Some of his concern must have shown in his face, or perhaps in the droop of his shoulders, for Maxim quickly led him to a table next to the stove.

“Sit down,” Maxim said. “We can have some tea, and I’ve got a cake from the bakery.” Ignoring Phil’s protests, he pushed him into a chair, and soon the two men were washing down pieces of a moist and fragrant plum cake with sips of strong China tea.

Maxim waved at the paper, saying, “I see that Oklahoma’s just become a new state. How many is that now?”

“Forty-six, I think.”

“Wonder how many there’ll be. Someday we’ll take in Canada and Mexico.”

“No, that won’t ever happen,” Phil said. “Forty-six is about big enough, I think.”

Maxim sipped his tea, and his bright blue eyes scanned Phil’s face. “Feeling a little bit down, are you, Phil?”

“Just a little, maybe.”

“That’s the way it goes with us artists, I suppose. We all
have our ups and downs, but God’s in His heaven. All’s going to be well.”

“You really believe that, don’t you, Max? That everything’s going to turn out all right in the end?” Phil’s wide mouth tightened grimly, and he shook his head. He stared down into the dainty cup he held, swirling the amber liquid. “With all the wars and the tragedies that occur right here in New York—the killings, the poverty—you still believe everything’s going to turn out all right.”

George Maxim was a strong Christian and had been a help to Phil before at times like this. “The Bible says that all things work together for good to them that love God,” he said firmly. “You love God, and therefore the thing you’re going through right now is good.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem like it.” Phil grinned tightly. He leaned back in his chair, soaking up the heat that radiated from the coal stove, and added, “I’m sorry to be such a complainer, Max. Sometimes it gets to me.”

“Of course it does, but remember this. God’s favorites have gone through the furnace of affliction more often and for longer periods than anyone else. Why, look at Joseph. God intended to make a great man out of him, but look what Joseph had to go through. He was betrayed by his brothers, thrown into a pit, sold into slavery; then he had to go to jail. But God was in all of that, Phil. When Joseph finally came through all those ordeals, he became a great man. It was the difficulties that made him what he was, not the good times.”

Phil sat quietly enjoying the wisdom of the dealer, grateful that he had found one friend who had a faithful heart and a firm hold on the Scriptures. Maxim, somehow, reminded him of his own father, although they were dissimilar in so many ways. His father and mother both had this same firm grip on who a man or a woman was in God’s sight, and they both felt that God often uses hard circumstances to shape and mold the character of human beings.

“Why, it’s all right there in First Peter, Phil. Look here,
let me read it for you.” Jumping up, Maxim ran across the room, snatched the worn, thick Bible from the desk, then hurried back to his seat. He thumbed through the pages, licking his thumb often, until finally he said, “Ah, here it is! It says here that we have ‘an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled. . . .’ That’s what we’ve got, and not only that, but verse five says we ‘are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation. . . .’ So there! We have a great heritage, and we’re kept by God. But look at verses six and seven.” Clearing his throat, he read clearly and with obvious pleasure. “ ‘Wherein ye greatly rejoice, though now for a season, if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations: That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ. . . .’ ” Pounding the table, his eyes gleamed. “There it is, Phil. Right in the Word of God. God uses these hard times to purify us. One day you’ll look back on it all and thank God for the things he has worked into your life through them.”

“Do you think I’ll ever be a successful painter, Max?”

“Depends on what you mean. Successful as in ‘rich and famous’? Maybe. I believe you have it in you to be a great painter, Phil. But the success
God
wants for you is to bring you to maturity in Christ—whether or not you ever become known as a painter.”