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The gauze of the gown where it blended with the background at the edge of the line of arm was so thin, seemingly made by a single brush-stroke, that it almost showed the canvas. A purpose in that gauze: The thinness of transparency of character! The eyes of the portrait alone seemed deep.
Aaron King was sitting before his finished picture. The colors were still fresh upon the canvas that, to-day, hangs in an honored place in one of the great galleries of the world. To the last careful touch, the artist had put into his painted message, the best he had to give. Back of every line and brush-stroke there was the deep conviction of a worthy motive.
The moon rode high and bathed the hills in its limpid yet elusive wash of silver and blue and dove grays. Far off like a brush-stroke from a dream palette ran the horizon's margin of hills and nearer at hand tapering poplars stood up like dark sentinels. The lights and music told of the dance still in progress and strolling figures occasionally crossed the silver patches between the shadows.
"I'm a-goin' atter them hills," he declared. "There hain't no gray in them thar mountings." "Squeeze some out, anyway." The artist suited the action to the word, and soon Samson was experimenting with a mixture. "Why, that hain't no gray," he announced, with enthusiasm; "that thar's sort of ashy purple." Still, he was not satisfied. His first brush-stroke showed a trifle dead and heavy.
And that this may not seem all a backward gaze, let me face about and look forward from the beginning a stretch of canvas, lurid sometimes, sometimes in glorious tinting, sometimes intensely dark, with rifts of lightning cleaving through its blackness. But nowhere dull, nowhere without design in every brush-stroke.
They stood beneath the portrait, and with the image present to their minds of painter and sitter hasting on their way to be wed, saw this equivocal masterpiece with a difference. Not Aurora alone looked forth from the canvas, throat of lily, cheek of rose, heaven-blue eyes, smile and ringlets of immitigable sunniness. Gerald, self-depicted in every subtle brush-stroke, looked, too.
Let them take on motion without losing their charm of low relief, or their serene composition within the four walls of the frame. As for the motion, let it be a further extension of the drawing. Let every gesture be a bolder but not less graceful brush-stroke. The Metropolitan Museum has a Van Dyck that appeals equally to one's sense of beauty and one's feeling for humor.
Jack bent over it, standing between the two. He laughed as he pointed to a peculiar brush-stroke insignificant in the general effect down in the lower right-hand corner. "There is my mark," he said, "and this is the duplicate I painted for Martin Von Whele, nearly six years ago." "I thought as much," exclaimed Mr. Lamb. "Are you sure of what you are saying, young man?" asked Sir Lucius.
"You never made one brush-stroke that was commonplace in all your life," said Geraldine abruptly. "Even I can see that." "Such praise from a lady!" he exclaimed, laughing. Geraldine smiled, too, and Naïda's pallid face lightened for a moment.
Van Dyck has painted the two with what might be called a greyhound brush-stroke, a style of handling that is nothing but courtly convention and strut to the point of genius. He is as far from the meditative spirituality of Rembrandt as could well be imagined. Be it an ancient or modern episode, the story could be told in the tone and with well-nigh the brushwork of Van Dyck.
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