When
people talked about his work they always said, "He's making such and
such a sum of money," and to keep up this wealth, the indispensable
companion of his glory, he had to paint by the job, cringing before the
vulgar throng that pays.
Renovales walked excitedly around the portrait. Sometimes this laborer's
work was tolerable, when he was painting beautiful women and men whose
faces had the light of intelligence. But the vulgar politicians, the
rich men that looked like porters, the stout dames with dead faces that
he had to paint! When he let his love for truth overcome him and copied
the model as he saw it, he won another enemy, who paid the bill
grumblingly and went away to tell everyone that Renovales was not so
great as people thought. To avoid this he lied in his painting, having
recourse to the methods employed by other mediocre artists and this base
procedure tormented his conscience, as if he were robbing his inferiors
who deserved respect for the very reason that they were less endowed for
artistic production than he.
"Besides, that is not painting, the whole of painting. We think we are
artists because we can reproduce a face, and the face is only a part of
the body. We tremble with fear at the thought of the nude. We have
forgotten it. We speak of it with respect and fear, as we would of
something religious, worthy of worship, but something we never see close
at hand. A large part of our talent is the talent of a dry-goods clerk.
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