This afternoon I followed one of these dream painters to his studio. The way led up a crooked street, down a narrow alley, into a court full of rubbish, up a flight of dingy stairs, down into another court (this one as dark as the stairs), up another rickety flight, and so to his door.
A feeble light struggled through the cobwebbed panes of the studio skylight, and the room was in a state of dirt and disorder. Tumbled in one corner were a lot of unfinished canvases, and dumped in another was a pile of unwashed dishes. A dirty divan canopied after the fashion of the Roman emperors served as a bed of state for the great man.
That he was once a genius was unquestionable from the evidence of some of his early works. He had been a masterly draftsman and a painter of virility and great richness of color. That is, when he painted, but this he never did so long as he possessed a sou. Many of his subjects I now found difficult to understand, even when he turned them right side up for me.
Some of them seemed prehistoric. Wan wisps of maidens floated dimly through heavy fogs, guided by symbols and illuminated by sacred fires. Some of them had no eyes and trailed their feet along the ground.
This artist was only one of many who cursed the public for their financial appreciation of popular modern art, which he termed “_des petites cochonneries_!”
There is a large class of poets, painters, sculptors and musicians for whom the wheel of fortune spins capriciously. Their idle hours are spent among their comrades in the cabarets and the little _boîtes_ tucked away in odd corners of Montmartre, where they breakfast and dine, accompanied by their sweethearts.
Of the latter they are a type unto themselves and wholly aloof from the life and night types of the rue Blanche.
Gaston the painter is a disciple of Botticelli, and you find the influence of dress and coiffure of that period asserting itself in the style of clothes and arrangement of hair of his sweetheart, Mariette. With her locks in _bandeaux_ she looks as saintly as a church picture.
Jacques the musician, a composer of sixteenth century pavans and minuets, has dressed the fair Amélie in an old-fashioned frock, cut low about the throat; her pretty face is framed in two curls, and there is a rose in her hair.