But what I mean to say is that you must accept the idiom of the time at which it was painted, and bearing that in mind I don’t think anyone can deny that it’s a masterpiece.
Of course just as a piece of painting it’s beyond praise, but it’s got a distinction and an imaginative quality which are very unique.
Don’t you think so, Leslie?”
“Definitely.”
“When I was a girl I used to spend hours looking at it.
It’s a picture that makes you dream.
Personally I think it’s a finer portrait than Velasquez’s Pope, the one in Rome, you know, just because it’s more suggestive.
Velasquez was a very great painter, I admit that, and he had an enormous influence on Manet, but what I miss in him is exactly what Titian had—Soul.”
Leslie Mason looked at his watch.
“We mustn’t waste too much time here, Venetia,” he said, “or we shall be late for lunch.”
“All right.
We’ll just go and look at the Ingres and the Manet.”
They walked on, glancing right and left at the pictures that lined the walls, but there was nothing that Mrs. Mason thought worth lingering over.
“It’s no good burdening their minds with a lot of impressions that’ll only confuse them,” she told her husband.
“It’s much better that they should concentrate on what’s really important.”
“Definitely,” he answered.
They entered the Salle des Etats, but at the threshold Mrs. Mason stopped.
“We won’t bother about the Poussins to-day,” she said.
“You have to come to the Louvre to see them, and there’s no doubt that he was a Great Artist.
But he was more of a painter’s painter than a layman’s, and I think you’re a little young to appreciate him.
One day when you’re both of you a bit older we’ll come and have a good go at him.
I mean you have to be rather sophisticated to thoroughly understand him.
The room that we’re coming to now is nineteenth century.
But I don’t think we need bother about Delacroix either.
He was a painter’s painter too, and I wouldn’t expect you to see in him what I do; you must take my word for it that he was a very considerable artist.
He was no mean colourist and he had a strong romantic feeling.
And you certainly needn’t trouble your heads with the Barbizon School.
In my young days they were very much admired, but that was before we understood the Impressionists even, and of course we hadn’t so much as heard of Cezanne or Matisse; they don’t amount to anything and they can be safely ignored.
I want you to look first at the Odalisque of Ingres and then at the Olympia of Manet.
They’re wonderfully placed, opposite one another, so that you can look at both of them at the same time, compare them and draw your own conclusions.”
Having said this Mrs. Mason advanced into the room with her husband by her side, while Charley and Patsy followed together a step or two behind.
On reaching the exact spot where she thought the two pictures which she particularly wanted her offspring to admire could be seen to best advantage, she stopped with the triumphant air with which a conjurer extracts a rabbit from a hat and cried:
“There!”
They stood in a row for some minutes and Mrs. Mason gazed at the two nudes with rapture.
Then she turned to the children.
“Now let’s go and examine them close at hand.”
They stood in front of the Odalisque.
“It’s no good, Venetia,” said Leslie.
“You may say I’m a philistine, but I don’t like the colour.
The pink of that body is just the pink of that face cream you used to put on at night till I made you stop it.”
“You needn’t reveal the secrets of the alcove to these innocent children,” said Venetia with a prim and at the same time roguish smile.
“But I would never claim for a moment that Ingres was a great colourist; all the same I do think that blue is a very sweet colour and I’ve often thought I’d like an evening dress just like it.
D’you think it would be too young, Patsy?”
“No, darling.
Not a bit.”
“But that’s neither here nor there.
Ingres was probably the greatest draughtsman who ever lived.
I don’t know how anyone can look at those firm and lovely lines and not feel he’s in the presence of one of the great manifestations of the human spirit.
I remember my father telling me that once he came here with one of his fellow-students from Julien’s who’d never seen it, and when his eyes fell on it he was so overcome with its beauty of line that he actually fainted.”
“I think it’s much more likely that it was long past the hour at which reasonable people have lunch and that he fainted with hunger.”