The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque Read Free

scrupulously saved five thou-sand dollars and then lost it in one fell swoop on a single race at Hanover. Following his loss he committed suicide. This then was Ryder's eulogy for him.
    Ryder sold his work when there were buyers, but he worked regardless of money, toiling to capture those things in paint that could not be expressed in words. By all accounts he was a strange fellow, somewhat shy and retir-ing, who used anything at hand on his paintings—alcohol, candle wax, varnish, oil. When his brushes failed him, he supposedly used the palette knife to spread thick gobs of paint.
    When the knife failed him, he used his hands, and when the varnish did not bring forth the quality he desired, it was said he used his own spit. He would paint a picture and, before it dried, paint another over it. I would not say he was naive, but when I met him I sensed a pal-pable innocence about him.
    With his calm demeanor, his large stature and full beard, he struck me as being like a biblical prophet.
    I remembered encountering one of his seascapes when I was a young apprentice to my mentor, M.
    Sabott. It was of a small boat in a wild ocean, and it radiated the over-whelming power of Nature and
    the courage of the insignificant sailor in the prow. Sabott, who stood next to me, labeled it a muddle.
    "This fellow is like a baby paint-ing with his own shit upon the nursery wall. The sign of a master is restraint," he said, and for some time that assessment stuck with me when I would happen upon one of his canvases at Cottier & Co., his gallery, or at one of the juried shows. Sabott may have had a point, but oh, to be that baby once again and revel in that singular vision, ignoring the Reeds of the world and their wealth.
    An acquaintance of Ryder's had once quoted to me something the painter had written to him in a letter. It went like this: "Have you ever seen an inchworm crawl up a leaf or twig, and then, clinging to the very end, revolve for a moment in the air, feeling for something, to reach something? That's like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing."
    I made a left at Twenty-first Street and headed toward my address, realizing that this was precisely what I needed. The trick was to reach beyond the safety of my present existence and rediscover myself as an artist. My only fear was that in reaching out, I might grasp nothing. I had already surmounted the crest of my years and begun on the denouement. Or let us say, I could feel the quick-ening wind in my thinning hair. What if I were to fail and on top of it lose my position as one of the most sought after portraitists in New York? I thought again of Ryder's painting of Death on horseback, and then of the fool who had saved and squandered everything at once. After all my serious contemplation I was more confused than ever. The pursuit of wealth and safety and the pursuit of a kind of moral truth had ingeniously changed horses, so to speak, in midstream. My longing to be other than what I was had risen to the surface, fraught with good intention, and then burst like a bubble in champagne. I shook my head, laughing aloud at my predicament, and that is when I felt something lightly strike my left shin.
    I looked up to see a man leaning against the wall, and it gave me quite a start. I composed myself and said, "Excuse me, sir," not without an air of irritation. He with-drew the black walking stick Page 5

    with which he had accosted me, and stepped forward. He was quite large but old, with a short white beard and a ring of white hair forming a perimeter to his otherwise bald scalp. His three-piece suit was pale violet, given interesting undertones of green by the glow of the street lamp near the curb. This unusual play of light took my attention for a moment until I looked him in the face and was startled by the discovery that his eyes had lost the distinction of pupil and iris and clouded to a uniform whiteness.
    "I believe you are the one