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Updated: June 24, 2025
These Tristrams were odd folk. There was the same blood in Cecily as had run in Addie Tristram's veins. On the other hand the Gainsboroughs seemed to have been ordinary. Was this period of indecision or of suspended action a time of struggle between the Tristram in Cecily and the Gainsborough?
He did not seem inclined to talk more about the Gainsboroughs, though his frown told her that something distasteful was still in his thoughts. What he had said was enough to rouse in her a great interest and curiosity about this girl who was his heir. Questions and rights attracted her mind very little till they came to mean people; then she was keen on the track of the human side of the matter.
Harry had no name according to law; no more than he had houses or pictures or treasures, any stick or stone, or the smallest heritage in the bed of the Blent. He had been son to the mistress of it all; she was gone and he was nobody according to law. It was, after all, a reasonable concession that his mother had urged on him; the Gainsboroughs ought to be asked to the funeral.
In looking through a collection of Reynolds, Gainsboroughs, Dobsons, Morlands, we are moved by something more than the artistic beauty of the pictures. Seeing that peaceful farmyard by Morland, a dim remote life, a haunting in the blood, rises to the surface of the brain, like a water-flower or weed brought by a sudden current into sight of the passing sky.
Wiltshire kept all the "Gainsboroughs" he could get, reveled in them during his long life, basked and bathed his soul in their beauty, and dying, bequeathed them to his children. Had Wiltshire been moved by nothing but keen, cold, worldly wisdom which he wasn't he could not have done better.
Hallin was apt to find the world grow tiresome. For against all his advice "mummy" would allow herself to be clad by Annette, the maid, in a frock of state; carriages would drive up from the 5.10 train; and presently in the lengthening evening the great lawns of the Court would be dotted with strolling groups, or the red drawing-room, with its Romneys and Gainsboroughs, would be filled with talk and laughter circling round mummy at the tea-table; so that all that was left to Hallin was that seat on mummy's knee his big, dark head pressed disconsolately against her breast, his thumb in his mouth for comfort which no boy of any spirit would ever consent to occupy, so long as there was any chance of goading a slack companion into things better worth while.
But, meanwhile, the Reynoldses and Gainsboroughs and Watteaus and Fragonards themselves, though the legal property of everybody, are really reserved for those same classes who own their modern equivalents, simply because those alone have the leisure and culture necessary to enjoy them.
Yet we should hesitate to destroy our Reynolds and Gainsboroughs, to preserve any works of art, however beautiful. Were we to keep what our reason told us was the greatest, we should feel as one who surrendered England to save the rest of the world, or as a parent who sacrificed his children to save a million men from the scaffold. Woman's nature is more facile and fluent than man's.
If family relics were worth preserving, what could be more remarkable than Annie's Washington letter, her Jefferson tray, her Gainsboroughs of the Murisons who had been the only Americans so honoured by the painter?
He paused to look round the room a moment, before yielding himself to one of the many possible conversations which, as he saw, it contained for him. It was a stately panelled room of the last century, furnished with that sure instinct both for comfort and beauty which a small minority of English rich people have always possessed. Two glorious Gainsboroughs, clad in the subtlest brilliance of pearly white and shimmering blue, hung on either side of the square opening leading to the inner room. The fair, clouded head of a girl, by Romney, looked down from the panelling above the hearth. A gowned abbé, by Vandyck, made the centre of another wall, facing the Gainsboroughs. The pictures were all famous, and had been associated for generations with the Delafield name. Beneath them the carpets were covered by fine eighteenth-century furniture, much of it of a florid Italian type subdued to a delicate and faded beauty by time and use. The room was cleverly broken into various circles and centres for conversation; the chairs were many and comfortable; flowers sheltered tête-
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