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The heads are full of character and life, powerfully and rapidly painted in black and red, on a brick or tile, thickly overlaid with gesso. The brush-strokes are bold and firm, and the outline slightly incised in the plaster.
To make a noble picture, a dining-room piece, you must take the same lady and invest her in a Doric chiton or diploida and himation; give her a pocillum, a censer, a sacrificial ram, and a distant view of Tivoli; round your modelling, and let your brush-strokes be long and slightly curved; affect sober and rather hot pigments; call the finished article "Dido pouring libations to the Goddess of Love."
The daughters looked like two little blond princesses: with rosy cheeks, eyebrows like two golden brush-strokes, almost colourless, clear blue eyes of a heavenly blue, and such small red lips, that on seeing them, the classical simile of cherries came at once to one's mind. The Countess of San Martino asked Caesar like a shot if he was married and if he hadn't a sweetheart.
A dozen innuendoes, as light as dandelion feathers, conveyed it to him; swift brush-strokes of gesture and inflection sketched the picture in; an affectionate burlesque of awe completed it, so that he could laugh at her for it as she had meant he should.
Indeed, he has surpassed even the limits of extravagance with the new and fanciful inventions and the strange vagaries of his intellect, working at haphazard and without design, as if to prove that art is but a jest. This master at times has left as finished works sketches still so rough that the brush-strokes may be seen, done more by chance and vehemence than with judgment and design.
Then the fever seized him again, and he strung pearl on pearl, line on line, without entrusting a word to paper. Even to discuss his work before it had received the final brush-strokes would have seemed indecent to him. Reginald, too, seemed to be in a turmoil of work. Ernest had little chance to speak to him.
Until one stroke has been well learned, they are not suffered to attempt another much less a combination. Long before the first lesson is thoroughly mastered, the white paper has become all evenly black under the multitude of tyro brush-strokes. But the same sheet is still used; for the wet ink makes a yet blacker mark upon the dry, so that it can easily be seen.
Shivering, we busied ourselves with unloading and distributing bread, our hands numbed and wet, and then ate it hurriedly while we stood in the road, which gleamed with heavy parallel brush-strokes of gray paint as far as the eye could see. Each looked after himself, with hardly a thought for the next man.
His brush-strokes are very few in number, but each one tells. They are laid on with a touch which is little short of marvelous, and requires heredity to explain its skill. For in his method there is no emending, no super-position, no change possible. What he does is done once and for all. The force of it grows on you as you gaze. Each stroke expresses surprisingly much, and suggests more.
She worked on in silence for another quarter of an hour, completing her picture with rapid, vigorous brush-strokes. Then he took up her campstool and easel, and they walked together alongside the Roman aqueduct to the centre of the town, under an avenue of tall, spreading plane trees, yellow with the first delicate leaves of Spring like the feathers of a newborn chick.
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